'in Mm w iiiii LIBRARY mmslTf Of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE LAST LEAVES. SKETCHES AND CRITICISMS, BY ALEXANDER SMITH, AUTHOR or " A LIFE-DRAMA," " DREAMTHORP," ETC. ETC. Edited, with a Wemoir, by PATRICK PROCTOR ALEXANDER, M.A. AUTHOR OF " MILL AND CARLYLE," ETC. ETC. EDINBURGH: WILLIAM P. NIMMO. 1868. 5 5^37 CONTENTS. Memoir, . . . . Scottish Ballads, An Essay on an Old Subject, On Dreams and Dreaming, . Mr Carlyle at Edinburgh, Winter, Literary Work, . The Minister-Pai^stter, Sydney Dobell, Essayists, Old and New, A Spring Chanson, Edinburgh, . Appendix, I 64 80 93 112 126 140 171 210 300 .^06 315 V/,>-o MEMOIR. N superintending the issue of this selec- tion from the Essays of my friend, the late Alexander Smith, it has fallen to me to write, as Preface to it, some little account of him as he lived. It is a task which I would willingly have declined, as knowing its extreme delicacy ; also, as well knowing that I shall not succeed in doing it as I myself should wish to see it done. Not the less, on other grounds, I am frankly willing, and, in some sort of sad fashion, pleased, "to do the best I may in the matter. What I have to write I shall write very simply as it is given me, believing that that will be best ; except as I should be sorry indeed that the book or the memory of the man should suffer through any hetiseoi mine, not too curiously con- cerned, as I proceed, as to what may be thought of my performance, and especially indifferent A I vi MEMOIR. to possible charges against it, in parts, of the egotis7n which, I trust, will be seen to be pretty- much in the nature of the task itself, as I con- ceive it. Alexander Smith was born at Kilmarnock, in Ayrshire, on the 31st December 1829. He was the eldest born of his parents — excellent people both, who lived to take just pride in the world's recognition of his genius, and, more lately, to have life saddened for them by his too early death. Some few years after, the family re- moved to Paisley, and thence, in a short ti me, to Glasgow. Of the education which he there received it seems scarcely necessary to say any- thing. I should suppose it to have been a fairly good one, including, as it did, with the three indispensable R's, some tincture of Latin and mathematics. His knowledge of these two latter branches he did not much air in his later time ; perhaps because he really knew them ; more probably, because he had forgotten them as completely as if for some years of his life he had studied them diligently at a University. Properly, his education may perhaps have amounted to this, that he was thoroughly well taught to read ; and — the key thus put into his MEMOIR. vii hands which unlocks all the wards of knowledge — ^he proceeded to make pretty good use of it. With a fair round of general information, taken on his own special topics of English poetry and the Belles Lettres — English literature, I may say, in extenso — he was always to be held, as it seemed to me, an unusually well-read man, even among men professedly literary. The boy early gave evidence of talent ; and, at one time, it was proposed to educate him for the ministry. It is, perhaps, no mighty matter of regret that this project, for some reason or other, was abandoned. Undoubtedly, as a parson, he would have been much beloved by his parishioners ; but there seems no special reason to suppose he would have shone as a pulpit orator. He would scarcely have written the " Life Drama," or writing, could scarcely have published it ; and, instead of " Dream- thorp," etc., the world might perhaps have been favoured with some volumes of dull discourses, which would not, by comparison, have enriched it. Mr Smith, senior, was a pattern-designer ; and by this accident, as I imagine, rather than any special leaning or aptitude that way, the junior was determined to the same employment. viii MEMOIR. If — as he used to tell — great part of his early poetry was composed by him over his work, it may be surmised that the design, taking shape under the hand, would not exceedingly profit by that intense pre-occupation of the head. In after life, he was never, that I heard of, known to touch a pencil ; a fact which, of itself, may be held conclusive, as showing that, in his choice of a pursuit, he was ruled by no depth of natural tendency. Still, the designs — such as they might be — were, no doubt with perfect regu- larity, produced ; and, along with them, much of the poetry which afterwards, as the " Life Drama," became famous. Certain of his verses appeared from time to time in the Glasgow Citizen, edited by Mr James Hedderwick, a man of the nicest literary taste, "an accomplished journalist, and poet of no mean order,"* with whom he was thus brought into friendly relations. Naturally, however, the "Poet's Corner," after his first flush of young fool's delight in seeing himself actually in print, came to seem to him a some- what restricted field ; and, with a view to a wider publicity, early in 185 1, he forwarded a selec- Summer in Skye," A. Smith. MEMOIR. ix tion of his pieces to the Rev. Mr George Gil- fillan of Dundee, asking his opinion and advice. From Mr Gilfillan he had instant and generous recognition ; and shortly, through his kindly- furtherance, the poems began to appear, by regular instalments, in the London Critic, a jour- nal then of wide circulation, with which he was connected as contributor. There and elsewhere, moreover, he expressed, in no stinted terms of eulogy, his sense of the power and promise of the " New Poet " he had thus had the luck to unearth. That in the first instance, and as gain- ing him the ear of the public on the instant, Mr Gilfillan was of much use to Smith, he him- self, as the last man in the world to forget a true kindness done him, always continued to acknowledge. The interest excited in London literary circles by the poetry, as it thus appeared, was some- thing quite unusual ; and — as then living in Glasgow — I very well remember the curious speculation which was rife as to wliat kind of strange bird this might be, beginning so to pipe in our midst. Soon, through his friend Mr Hedderwick, who asked me to meet him of an evening, I had the pleasure of making his ac- X MEMOIR. quaintance. Considering his youth, and the somewhat exuberant cast of the poetry, I con- fess I expected to meet a more or less flighty kind of blockhead, whose gyrations in the direc- tion of the Empyrean it might be not unamusing to watch. With a considerable shock of sur- prise, and possibly — the amusement being looked to — of something very like disappointment, I found myself face to face with one of the most simple, quiet, modest, and unassuming of men. He did not gyrate in the least, and seemed to indicate, indeed, an entire, and even helpless, incapacity for that kind of performance. He did not speak overmuch ; rather showed a con- siderable talent for silence, which — except in the entire unreserve of intimacy, not even in which was he wont to be specially voluble — he continued through life to cultivate. Anything he did say was closely pertinent to the matter in hand— plain, shrewd, sensible. What, at first meeting, struck me as remarkable about him, besides this unexpected quiet sense and solidity, was his forehead, which really, I think, was re- markable — a fine square block of brain, such as I have not often seen the like of, with dark hair massed heavily over it. Otherwise — except MEMOIR. xi for something of a squint, a little startling at first, but which afterward you would not have wished away — his face, though comely and ex- pressive, was not such as to strongly arrest attention. Afterwards, as the years dealt with him, he changed somewhat in appearance. As he neared middle age, face and figure became fuller, and the first, as the fashion of the day suggested, was improved by a moustache and an ample beard, brown in colour, and of almost exceptionally fine proportions. In himself he changed not a jot ; remaining throughout, and to his last hour, precisely the same simple, quiet, unassuming, undemonstrative man who met me that first evening ; without a suspicion in him of anything like small affectation ; averse in his own person from every form of self-exhibition, and with a humorous and kindly contempt for that vanity as it showed itself in others. This identity was, perhaps, even curious, and of itself might be held to illustrate the truth and sin- cerity of his nature. Most of us may have known people who seemed to us, on the first blush of acquaintance, of something like ideal excellence ; but by and by we found them out : and even if the excellence remained, it shrunk. xii MEMOIR. and seemed more and more short of the ideal at first suggested. The man who has hitherto shone in your eyes as the very soul of easy gene- rosity, is precisely the person who is sure not to have the necessary £^ when you wish to- oblige him by borrowing it. The only certain truth as yet known in ethics is this — that it is good to believe in human virtue, and better still, as a rule, not to test it any way severely. Nobody better than Smith stood the test which is neces- sarily furnished by a long and intimate acquain- tance. He did not in the least strike you as ideal, to start with, but as something very genuine and real ; and more and more you found that \vq. was so. He was eminently ^^^^ wear, so, in some rough and ready way, to phrase it. To Smith, as to myself, this evening could not fail to be memorable, if only as for both of us the commencement of intimacy with a most interesting, and, in some distinct sense, remark- able, man, by name Hugh Macdonald. Hugh was one of the be.st and most curious specimens of a class of men which this curious country called Scotland produces, in perhaps somewhat exceptional numbers. The famous "Parochial MEMOIR. xiii System " — now on its last legs, they say — has had something to do in the production of them ; but much more Robert Burns, who has simply, for the humbler grades of the Scottish people, done the work of a legion of schoolmasters. (It is not, of course, to be forgotten that Burns was himself an effect^ and in this relation must figure as rt^/^-cause, rather than accurately cause.) Originally a factory operative, Macdonald had developed himself into a poet {of course, with Burns as the god of his idolatry) ; a naturalist of no ordinary accomplishment, more especially in the branch of botany ; and a writer of really good and eloquent prose,* with, perhaps, just the least little tendency to become at times too eloquent — Burns, perhaps, being his theme, the Osniunda Regalis, or some other of the botanical hobbies on which he was wont to career about with astonishing vigour and en- thusiasm. In virtue of all this, he had come into contact with Mr Hedderwick — to whom, in that metropolis of cotton, anything literary * His two books, "Rambles Round Glasgow," and " Days at the Coast," are really, in their kind, of quite superior excel- lence, and, as Guide Books to the whole district, attained a great popularity. xiv MEMOIR. seemed by natural necessity to gravitate — and was at this tin^e employed as his sub-editor. The three of us.going away together, as we did, naturally enough met again at my room the evening after. As the first of many such even- ings, I infer it mu.st have passed, on the whole, pleasantly ; and some sort of comfortable intimacy was pretty rapidly established. Smith had after- wards many friends, and of these an unusual pro- portion, his relations with whom were close, cor- dial, and even to be called endearing ; but scarce any of them was ever his ^^Jo;«-friend (to use an expressive, if somewhat gushing phrase) in such sense as Hugh Macdonald. The two speedily become so inseparable that almost on meeting one of them, you would look about in some puzzled way, as if expecting the other. And the men were so utterly unlike, that there conjunc- tion had in it a positive element of the ludicrous. Macdonald, though born in Glasgow, and essen- tially a Lowland Scot, was a Celt, as his name im- plies, and some portion of his boyhood had been passed among relations in Mull. Though this had left but little trace in him, there could be no mistake about the breed. He had much of the Celtic vividness, vivacity, enthusiasm ; " the MEMOIR. XV flash and outbreak of the fiery mind " was per- petually expressed in his speech, and his various odd modes of procedure. Smit\, on the other hand, fronted the world, as I' said, as quiet an embodiment as may be, of the right Saxon sense, shrewdness, and solidity. The contrast was fundamental ; and at almost every point of detail it was so marked as to make the friendly amalgam of the two amusing, not to say absurd. Most pleasant comrades each apart, together they were really incomparable ; and when I used to expect them of an evening, one or two congenial spirits would probably be asked to drop in. Do ever any of my friends in the West recall these Nodes ccsnasqiie Deoriim ? I should think it not improbable ; for — the omens being reasonably propitious — there could scarcely be better entertainment. Our " Society," whether or no to be held "good" in the paltry, and, perhaps, rather idiotic sense, was as good as any I have seen, or much care to see ; and almost immeasurably better, for any rational purpose of either instruction or delight, than other societies I have seen, which would have been shocked to hear they were considered not quite unimpeachably "good!' By virtue of his xvi MEMOIR. real conversational power, Macdonald, on his own topics, would have shone in any society in which, as thoroughly at home, he felt himself free to develop it. Smith, who had afterwards fair opportunities for testing ability in that kind, used always to say, that for vital force and brilliancy of talk he had not met any one quite equal to "poor Hugh" at his best. (He died some few years after this, but never ceased to be affectionately remembered, and every now and then referred to.*) Also, he had consider- able powers as a vocalist, and held himself frankly ready to sing at a moment's notice. Burns was his general stand-by ; and failing the songs of Burns, he was partial, I think, to his own, which he gave with fine, wild, masterly effect, to any tune or none, as it might chance. Nice connoisseurs among us would hint that generally, in this matter of tune, Hugh was the least thing shaky or so. As myself un- fastidious in such matters, — which Smith most distinctly also was, — I could never rightly see their objection, and rejoiced in the bursting sonl, * Some tender reminiscence and account of him will be found in the Glasgow section of Smith's "Summer in Skye." MEMOIR. xvii and genuine lyrical impetuosity of his per- formances. Afterwards, when these nice con- tioisseurs would show us in another company how the thing should scientifically be done, I missed the lyrical impetuosity, and found the science an indifferent substitute. But these are by comparison poor and trivial accomplishments. What on such occasions very particularly endeared him to us was this — that, with the warmest affection for Smith, as a man, he combined a resolute contempt for him as Poet, to which he never hesitated to give the very broadest Doric expression.* " I like ye * It was one of Hugh's whims, which aided the quaint effect of his conversation, that, though he could speak very good Enghsh, if he Uked, it was a point of honour with him not to do so. Smith, though a good Scot, was never specially to be called Scotch ; he did not, that is, " glory in the name of- Scotchman ;" his love of his country was pretty much like his love for his mother, a feeling to be understood as existing, but with which he did not think it necessary to rush clamorously into the street. He had, more- over, through literature— which in its essence is life— very strong English sympathies ; and even thus early Chaucer was, I think, more eminent with him than Bums, whom yet, of course, he knew most thoroughly. With ^klacdonald, on the other hand, Scotticism was a fiery and irrational passion, which in every way he held himself bound to assert ; and this was one of his ways of doing so. For all English sophistications and refine- ments of what he held to be the primitive speech of mankind, xviii MEMOIR. weel, Sandy," he would say, "an' that ye weel ken ; but as for yer poetry, as ye ca't ! sae help me God! I mak' but little o't. It may be poetry ; I'm no sayin' it is na ; the creetics say it's poetry, an' nae doot tJicy suld ken ; but it's no he professed a great abhorence in his friends ; and, for himself, as religiously eschewed them as an Israelite the unclean thing. The words Papa, Mamma, in particular, always comically ex- cited his antipathy ; and they could scarcely be used in his pre- sence without provoking some wild explosion. " Papazf .'" he would say, "mammrtw.'" with as great a length and breadth of scornful emphasis as the broadest Scotch tongue could convey. " What ails ye at faither and mither as ye hae them gi'en ye i' the Scripters ? But folk hae a' gotten sd^tjiine noo, that God's ain Scripter's no guid eneugh for them. Papaif! I scunner to hear't. Lod ! if ony bairn o' mine was to ca w^'papaw, I think I wad jist fent (faint). I daia- them to dae sic a thing!" And so forth. If, any time during summer, you chanced to be wandering about Loch Lomond, or any where in the beautiful Highland district which the Firth of Clyde lays open with its branching arms, you were nearly sure to spy on the deck of some steamboat, a quaint little figure in a huge old rusty pilot coat, crowned with a Glen- garry bonnet, jauntily set on one side, in which a considerable sprig of heather was always defiantly stuck, as making a testi- mony to all men. This was Hugh Macdonald on one of his perpetual " Rambles." The sprig of heather, on such occasions, was never in his toilet omitted ; his Scottish dialect he wore somewhat in the same way, at once as ornament, testimony, and defiance. So much in explanation of the savage jargon — as needs it must seem to many readers — he is, in the text, reported as speaking. MEMOIR. xix my kind o' poetry. Jist a blatter o' braw ~^y words, to my mind, an' bit whirly-whas, they ca' callages ! Damme if I can mak' either head or tail o't." (With this he invariably con- cluded ; and, in fact, it is not to be denied that the good Hugh shotted his speech at times — a sin, it may be hoped, forgiven him, as never in the list of the deadly ones.) Here, at least, was what could not but commend itself to Smith, as clearly a " candid opinion." It became part of the regular programme, at some time or other of the evening, to skilfully lead the conversation up to a discussion of Smith's claims, when Macdonald never failed in cffixt to deliver himself with trenchant em- phasis as above, however the tune might be played with lively and ingenious variations. Smith seemed always to enjoy quite as heartily as any one else what should have been his own discomfiture ; and shortly after, the two oddly- assorted companions would go off into the night together. The truth was that, in his fanatical devotion to Burns, Macdonald could not, except in the most grudging way, be got to concede merit to any other poet whatever ; somewhat as a ^ XX MEMOIR. knight of old, did his eyes but chance to stray to a rival beauty, might suspect in him- self dereliction, and some dishonour therein done to his own peerless Dulcinea. "Shake- speare ? " he would say, dubitatively ; " Weel- a^weel ! Shakespeare ! Nae doot a vera great poet ! I wadna just ventur to say oor Rabbie * could hae written ' Hawmlet ; ' but there's aye twa ways o' puttin' a thing. Honestly, div ye really think, noo" (with a twinkle in the keen ""rey eye of ironical humour, pre- sumably, more probably of intense convic- tion), " Shakespeare could hae written ' Tain o' ShanterV Dcil the fears d him !'' Shake- speare's superior claims were thus to be con- sidered neutralised, if not entirely disposed of. Lesser and later men were much more per- emptorily set aside. Keats was "a puir bit penny-whustle o' an English cratur ! ' Endee- mion,' say ye t There's naething in't to get a grip o\ I canna get a hand dt, Sandy, ony mair than o' ye, wi' yer whirly-whas. Hech ! but • The affectionate diminutive very commonly, in speaking of Bums, in use among the genuine Scotch populations. MEMOIR. xxi it's thin, thin — a bit coloured wab, the like o' whilk amaist ony speeder micht spin, gif ye gie'd it vermeelion i' the guts o't. Nae claith there to clead puir men's backs wi'!" Shelley was "whiles bonny, bonny ; but just clean daft, puir fallow! — a' i' the air, like his ain laverock."* Or again : " O' him ye ca' Wudsworth I hae jist nae opeenion ava. He drank naething a' his life but Lake watter, they say ; an' troth I weel be- liev't ; for little else e'er cam' oot o' him." For Tennyson, his expressed contempt was extreme ; and once — the book being at hand — I remember he effectively illustrated his position by a read- ing of "Airy, fairy Lilian." Working his Scotch with vigour, and carefully emphasising any little points of weakness — for which he had the keenest eye — he produced with much ease a detestable caricature, which nearly made us all expire with laughter. Then, of course, he triumphed : " Laugh awa', lads ! Deed, ye may weel laugh at him. O, but it's wersh, wersh,-!* that kin' o' * The allusion is, of course, to Shelley's famous "Sky Lark ;" and generally, it is to be said, that this critic had, at least, been at some pains to read the poets whom he professed to despise. + Wersh, an exquisitely-expressive word, of which, as of most of our exceptionally fine Scotch words, there is no exact English B 2 xxii MEMOIR. thing, to put beside the hke o' Rabbie ! I tell't ye he was nae poet." Finding himself in such excellent company, when under the critical ban, naturally Smith could not have his equanimity much disturbed by Macdonald's abuse of his " whirly-whas." equivalent. Tasteless, flavourless, comes perhaps as near it as may be ; but this is itself, by comparison, flavourless. Wcrsh is this, and something more ; giving tlie negative, and, along with it, some quaint sub-insinuation of scorn, half humorous, half dis- gustful. And so of other words of the same kind, e.g. — " The cantic auld folks crackitC croitse !" (from Burns' "Twa Dogs," of course). An exact ititellecttial equivalent of each of these three words can readily be given in English ; but a mere caput mortuum would thus be substituted for a line, to beat which, in its own class of subject, you may range the poetry of the world. What is a crack in English ? A chat! The synonym is as perfect as possible; yet the words are subtly distinguished from each other by a whole hemisphere of feeling. Achat, by comparison " wi' a crack," is a poor, frivolous, shallow, altogether heartless business. A crack is, indeed, only adequately to be defined as a ckat with a good, kindly, human heart in it ; whereas to chat is too probably to chatter merely, as Mr Carlyle would say, "from the teeth out- wards." It is in virtue of this shadow of home-grown emotion over it, that Scotch is so exquisite a vehicle — this is, I suppose, admitted — for the expression of the simpler forms of pathos, and a particular type of humour — a humour which is deep in the very genius of the language itself; and seems always at least as much indebted to t/ial as to the talent of the particular humorist. I MEMOIR. xxiii Apart from the general charge of gross pla- giarism — of which anon — afterwards preferred against the " Life-Drama," I have seen it alleged by here and there a depreciatory critic, that the detail of nature in it seemed rather got up by way of book than studied from the real thing. I should suppose there might be something in this ; inasmuch as Macdonald — by far the most competent judge of such a matter I ever chanced to come in contact with — used to tender the same accusation. Botany he had studied at once scientifically, and with the vivid interest of delight proper to the poet ; and touching the nature and habits of birds, beetles, butterflies, every creeping or flying thing, he was a mine of curious information.* Hence, as regarded the minuticB of nature, almost no poet was safe from him ; and even " Rabbie " himself would now and then be called in question "The * It will scarce ever, I believe, be found that a man of these peculiar tastes is of other than essentially gentle nature ; and of such ^^acdonald eminently was ; a man of "impetuous blood,' ' yet — as the phrase goes — who "would not have hurt a fly." These odd brusqueries and outbursts in which, on occasion, he indulged himself, were so//«tv/— thus to speak — in the genial and kindly nature of the man, that there could never be a shadow of offence in them, but merely matter of amusement. xxiv MEMOIR. Posie" he could not abide, in its incongruous conjunction of flowers which, as children of different seasons, could never in nature co- exist. Milton's "Lycidas" he abused on the same ground — it is needless to say his point of view was, in either case, quite wrong (though he never could be got to see this), as confusing the separate jurisdictions of the poet and the man of science — and he wrote a song called " The Flower Lovers " (really an exquisite piece), from which, as done on exact principles, he plainly considered both " Rabbie " and Milton, had they survived to hear him sing it, would have got an important wrinkle or two. Smith's preten- sions to any accurate knowledge of Nature he treated with undisguised contempt ; and, in the country walks they constantly took together, he assiduously set himself to coach him up in these neglected parts of knowledge. As frequently present, I may certify, that seldom can the truths of Natural Science have been communicated in more original and ^ amusing fashion. It was commonly of a Sunday (the Sawbith they mostly called it in these parts) that we sallied forth on such excursions. How vividly I now remember them; and the figure of Macdonald, with its MEMOIR. XXV oddity somewhat enhanced by a huge tin case slung round him, which he called, I rather think, a Vasaduni ! This implement was popularly supposed to receive and conserve botanical specimens ; but I don't think I ever saw any in it. Not the less, on such occasions, Hugh never came abroad without it ; and it was plain he considered it conferred on the expedition some savour of the dignity of Science. On this vas- culum of Hugh's, Smith and I used to break at times a good deal of profane wit — or iviit, as perhaps, it might be — but all to no purpose. And no doubt the thing had its uses ; if it never brought back any specimens, at least it seldom failed to take out with it a fair supply of whisky and sandwiches. Our favourite walk was some five or six miles up Clyde from Glasgow, and included many reaches of river scenery so exquisite in beauty that I have scarce elsewhere seen them equalled. It had also the advantage of including (Forbes Mackenzie, as yet, was not) a certain modest hostelrie, a very pet "howf" of Macdonald's, kept by a fine, typical, old Scotch- woman, whose cakes and ale were excellent, and whose racy, old homely humours made you feel as if, in entering her hut, you had walked into a xxvi MEMOIR. Waverlcy novel. These were delightful days ; and otherwise I consider it certain that Smith well found his account in them. With the truest delight in Nature, which had in him the depth of an instinct, his natural tendency was rather to brood and expand in spirit over the wide glories of the sky and earth, than to close and minute observation in detail. This, and the habit of this, his association with Macdonald more and more tended to educe in him. Moreover, Hugh, in his own person, was on these topics profuse and inexhaustible, so as — me jiidice — nearly to become a bore at times ; and only to listen to him thus a-field, was, for one with any care or turn that way, to acquire a great deal of useful and useless information. It is scarcely too much to say, that three-fourths of what, for Smith, might be afterwards in this kind available, was taught him by Hugh Macdonald. Once, as we were pacing quietly along a wooded stretch of the river side, he broke out suddenly, " Od, but he 's a queer fallow that ! " and catching on the instant our surprise — no soul being visible in the landscape to whom the remark could apply — he added, " It 's that chiel Tennyson I 'm speakin' MEMOIR. xxvii o'. Hark ye baith, noo : " and in his very best English manner, he went on to quote, "Why lingers she to clothe her heart with love? Delaying, as the tender ash delays. To clothe herself when all the woods are green." " Ye mind it, Sandy ! it's i' the ' Princess ;' an' noo, look ye, t/ia^'s an ash" — pointing with his staff — "maybe ye think it's an elm, Sandy ! but it's no an elm, it's an ash; au' dcil a leaf orit, see ye na ? an' «' the itJicr trees are oot ! I didna need ony o' yer Tennysons to tell me that ; but neither o' ye kent it, I reckon. He 's nae poet ; I '11 aye say that ; but I'se alloo ye '11 no aften find him wrang wi' his flooers, an' his trees, an' things ; Jie kens them, Sandy! zxi ye dinna. But ye 're nae poets, neither tane nor t' ither o' ye. Damme if," etc., (the usual amen to the discourse). Another time, on a bright spring morning, the air all ringing round us with the keen, clear music of the larks, fluttering up and falling, he took occasion most learnedly to expound to us the meaning of the passage in the " Gardener's Daughter," in which the lark is said to " Shake its song together as it nears - Its happy home, the ground" — by both of us admitted somewhat obscure. I xxviii MEMOIR. am unable to reproduce his statement in the vernacular ; but, in effect,, it was somewhat thus — that the note of the climbing lark is subtly- distinguished from that of the descending one ; the effect in the one case being expansive, in the other, concentrative : the song of the creature as it soars seeming to fling itself rapturously abroad into the skyey spaces, and out of them as it descends, with equal rapture to collect itself, so to speak, converging on the home-nest beneath. To Macdonald's ear — if you believed him — this distinction in the notes was as perfect as any in music. On my venturing to say that to mine, after trying ever so, it remained quite inappreci- able, a brusque " It 's weel seen jj/, of direct imitation ; and the hands of the detrac- tors were strengthened who had more lately been saying he could do nothing distinctively his own, but only more or less cleverly follow where cleverer fellows had led. This was simply of the nature of misfortune for him ; and as such, providentially sent him, he accepted it Mith his admirable quietude, not needlessly kicking against the pricks, yet not the less, doubtless, in his soul, cursing it a little as true misfortune. MEMOIR. Ixxxiii With Tennyson's consummate work, only an injudicious admirer will think of comparing "Edwin;" but Smith runs him perhaps a fair second ; and I do not doubt the book would have done better, had the public got it, as in much written, before Tennyson's, not after. To say sooth, the material seems, in parts, but im- perfectly mastered ; yet the effect is on the whole fine, and the book abounds in passages of beau- tiful, and sometimes noble, poetry. Moreover, apart from substantive success, the truth and height of aim are, by comparison, to be recog- nised ; and on the whole perhaps advance is again to be noted. But the Poet's victory — if such to be held — was like one of Napoleon's later vic- tories — as at Bautzen, where the great Captain, having driven his foes from the field, had to cry, in passionate disgust, " What ! no prisoners ! no guns ! no results! " The net result here to Smith on the system of half profits — now adopted — as given in a tragical Publisher's document before me — was, for his really stiff spell of anxious and careful work, precisely £i^, 5s. 3<^- — absolutely only 5s. 3d. more than Milton, first and last, had for his " Paradise Lost." For Smith this was a " Paradise Lost" — the Paradise, Ixxxiv MEMOIR. to wit, of Poetry, not farther on these bare terms to be prosecuted by a gentleman of small income unfortunately/;iY^;* of family only fixed in this sense, that it was fixed by fate as always steadily on the increase. Some " Paradise Regained" of Prose was thus now the thing to be aimed at. With Prose he had, ere this, somewhat begun to concern himself. And now, he very steadily betook himself to it ; writing of the other and always dearer thing, only such an occasional lyric or the like as " came to him," and coming, could in no wise be cast out. If a Poet— one of the born breed, who " sings but as the linnet sings"— could subsist himself as the linnet does by pecking easily about the hedge-rows, the arrangement might have its advantages ; but it has not been so ordered. Not even Mr Tenny- • Let me be exact as to this. Originally, as said, his income was ;^iSO. More lately, by increase which accrued to him as Registrar and Secretary to the University Council, it amounted to C^QO. As economics are in question, it may farther be ex- plained, as illustrating the necessity under which he latterly found himself of drudging pretty hard With his pen, that his own immediate and increasing family expenses were by no means the sole claim upon him. To others he was fairly liable ; and once, ■ in particular, had to fit out and send to India one of his younger brothers, in itself a somewhat serious pull upon a purse no better furnished than his. MEMOIR. Ixxxv son, I expect, finds that he can pay his butcher with an autograph, unless it be written on the duly stamped cheque of some Bank, in which he has a deposit. So with Smith and his butcher ; and as poetry would not pay the butcher, prose now must. In prose he had a graceful and facile gift ; and he speedily found that for what he might write there was always ready market, and gratifying acceptance with the public. His books may rapidly be chronicled — which, how- ever, give only the faintest notion of the quantity of work produced ; what might, by comparison, be termed the spray of his mind being thrown off besides constantly and in various directions. In 1863 appeared "Dreamthorp" (published by Messrs Strahan) a volume of delightful "Essays," embodying in parts a great deal of really fine and subtle thinking, and written throughout in a style of much grace and sweetness, delicately shimmering from time to time with the lights of essential poetry. It seems to me that, of all his books, this has most of himself in it ; gives the most express image of the man as he was to those who best knew him ; of his quiet, hearty ways, his lurking humour, the general effect of geniality he produced ; geniality sweetly acidulated — were F 2 Ixxxvi MEMOIR. such a phrase to be permitted — with a cynicism never untender. So long as the world may chance to want reading of this particular kind, it might do worse than remember " Drcamthorp." Meantime, it was a highly successful book, and achieved a wide circulation. " The Summer in Skye" (also by Messrs Strahan) followed in 1 865 ; and as written thoroughly con avtore, as it could not fail to be, on a subject very near his heart, it had at least equal success. No one should visit the island without scanning its vivid and charming pages. Written originally, however, in two volumes, and not as at first he had himself proposed, in one, it contains at the beginning and the end a good deal of extraneous matter, not in itself to be wished away, yet which has not always delighted purchasers careless of Literature, who bought it on trust of its title page, for severe busi- ness purpose of a Guide Book. Neither as such, in its Skye portion, will it quite bear to be regarded with strictly a business eye. In this same year was produced by Messrs Macmillan an edition of Burns edited by him, to which was prefixed an extended and elaborate Memoir, which, after all that has been written on its MEMOIR. Ixxxvii subject by men very famous indeed, bears ex- ceedingly well perusal. To the whole there was added a Glossary on some new and complex principle, which cost him a deal of pains ; in fact, it bored him dreadfully, and he growled a good deal over it, while admitting that in strictness he ought not to growl, as having for the total performance very liberal solatium from the publisher. Meantime, from month to month, in the pages of " Good Words," was appearing his little story, " Alfred Hagart's Household." This, too, he had planned as one volume ; but the publisher, find- ing it a highly popular item of the Magazine, prevailed on him to extend it into two, very obviously to its detriment, the later portions — in themselves inferior — but indifferently coalescing with the first. This work he undertook as simply a tentative of what he might be able to do in fiction. There is in it a great deal of tender, quiet sketching, both pathetic and humorous, with nice apergus of character ; and especially it seems to succeed in its renderings of child- nature, than success in which there is perhaps no more decisive guarantee of the true gift of a subtle humane insight. With the reception ac- corded to the book, he had every reason to be Ixxxviii MEMOIR. gratified ; and it was in this field that his next, and more serious effort would have been made — there seems every reason to believe, with good and effective result. Whilst death was unawares busy with him, he was maturing the scheme of a Novel on the understood scale. As knowing himself a little shaky on the constructive side, he said he did not mean to write a word till he had got the whole thing, to some distinct and satisfactory extent, imaginatively made compact within him. Thus, so far as is known, nothing of it was ever written. All I know of it is, that it would have included a Scotch element. About the very last time I dined with him, I remember retailing a highly ludicrous scene I had just chanced to be witness of, illustrating the fierce theological proclivities of the Scottish carter; and the little amusement it caused being over, I generously said, " I don't mind making you a present of that for your novel, Smith ! " " Thank you for nothing, old fellow !" with base ingrati- tude he answered, " I spotted it as it left your lips ; and one or other of these fine days, per- haps you'll see it in print." This was, however, not to be. Within the space of time indicated, there is MEMOIR. Ixxxix given in the above, a fair modicum of work ; and as before said, it was only a tithe of that really- done. Of this other desultory business no ac- count need be attempted. From the time of his decisively taking to prose, as, after all, the thing to boil the pot by, his irons in the fire were al- ways numerous. For three Encyclopedias, in succession, he did a good deal of work — Mac- kenzie s Biographical, the Britannica, and Cham- bers s — the Editor of the last of which, the ex- cellent and accomplished Dr Findlater — from the old Raleigh Club time, one of his fastest friends — used to say that, for neat, felicitous, carefully-condensed work on the prescribed con- ditions — by comparison, of some brevity — he had no such literary contributor. Of Magazines, Newspapers, and so forth, it need only be said they were numerous. One newspaper only need be particularised — the Caledonian Mercury — an otherwise unnotice- able organ, now defunct — to which, in mere love of the thing (though paid, of course), he from year to year contributed notices of the Royal Academy Pictures — bright, easy, lively sketching and criticism, such as not many newspapers fa- vour their readers with on that particular topic. xc MEMOIR. Of Art, in the technical sense, he made small profession of knowledge, eschewing the wretched jargon supposed to indicate knowledge; but from their intellectual side as Poetry he read pictures with a subtlety somewhat rare ; and even of the technical business, en amateur, knew probably a good deal. Almost all the artists he knew, so as to drop in at their studios ; with not a few of them he was intimate ; and Horatio Macculloch, not improbably the greatest master of landscape who ever touched a brush in Scot- land, was, as it were, a sort of elder brother to him. They lived only some. quarter of a mile apart ; and when not found at home of a Satur- day or Sunday afternoon, he was nearly sure to be found smoking in Macculloch's studio, ex- changing easy talk with the artist, as, under the deft hand, the landscape grew upon the canvas. For artists, as a class, as I before said, he had always rather a liking ; their careless, pleasantly- Bohemian ways suited him somewhat better than those of men of business. Properly, his love of Art was one with his deep instinctive feehng for Nature ; as indeed in a man of any culture, the presence of the last, in any force, will more or less imply the other. Mr MEMOIR. xci James Hannay, in a tender and graceful re- miniscence of him, contributed to " Cassells' Magazine," has said that his was "a life of which enjoyment of Nature formed a great part." Nothing can be more true ; if at all you knew him, you knciv this ; though it was not quite easy to say how you could come by your know- ledge, as of anything like expressed rapture and rhapsody on this, as on the other understood topics for such, he was always entirely innocent. He was one of those invaluable men, with whom it was possible to walk for an hour or so through a beautiful stretch of landscape, and be bored with no single exclamation about it. For which precise reason you kneiv, as I said, that in soul he exulted and expatiated. As in fact it might be gathered from his books, it was some- what less in the severer beauty of form than in the festal glory of colour superinduced, that by instinct he took delight — a fact perhaps to be noted as not wholly without pertinence to his writings, as giving — by analogy — the key to somewhat of their beauty, if also to somewhat of their defect. A silence utter and total on such subjects he did not enforce upon himself ; and now and then one admired the watchful xcil MEMOIR. exactitude of his eye for nice minutiae of this kind. Thus — merely as an instance — once in late autumn, as we lay, smoking and silent, on the hill above Bonaly — the noble landscape stretched beneath, with the fretted outline of the city bounding it, and beyond, far reaches of shining sea, in dim distance wedded with the sky — he said suddenly: " Oh ! look at these sprays of birch there between us and the tints of far sky ; don't they look as if they would drip pii7-plc wine to us ?'' — adding, with one of the whimsical turns familiar to those who knew him, "I wish to heaven they would!" Very cordially echoing the wish, I looked, and saw that he had photographed the effect in words, as probably his friend Macculloch would have given £iOQto be able to put it on canvas. For something more than a year before his death, it was known to his friends that all was not strictly right with him. While looking well and rosy — of which he would humorously com- plain as a great aggravation of his distress — he had strange nervous distempef-atures — unac- countable panic would beset him at times ; at other times he would suddenly feel as if the solid earth had gone from beneath his feet, and he MEMOIR. xciii was insecurely walking on clouds — so insecurely, indeed, that he had hastily to throw himself into a cab, etc., etc. One sees it all now with doleful clearness. His brain had been overworked ; had in some sense given way, and needed entire rest. And if his brain would decisively have given way, thus making rest imperative, he might now have been alive and with us. But the unhappy brain would not do this ; and so long as it did not fail him, his sense of duty would insist on woi^king it. And all the time he looked so well that, thinking his complaint some form of mere hypochondria, in one's wisdom, as thinking this the scientific treatment of the disorder, one rather fleered at than sympathised with him. These points of supposed wit at the time are not now very amusing, and need not be here com- memorated. In August 1866, he took his last holiday, which, it was hoped, might do him good ; but, alas ! even in the wilds, his inevitable Devil (the Printer's) more or less continued to haunt him ; and he returned not much renovated. There is evidence he had become seriously uneasy about himself It has often been noted how frequently in his writings there appears a melancholy brood- XCIV MEMOIR. ing over death ; and in the " Spring Chanson," at the close of the Book, written in May of the year, this recurs so strangely as to suggest dis- tinct prescience of the coming doom. Very touching is it now to note, how the cheery tone of Spring, with which it opens, as a forced and artificial gaiety, imperceptibly, as quite unwilfully, slides into the autumn sombreness, and sugges- tions of decay and death. Some little time before he was taken ill, he called on his friend Mr J. F. M'Lennan, Advocate, very well known to Anthropologists as author of a work on " Pri- mitive Marriage," and otherwise as writer of the "Life of Henry Drummond," and asked instruc- tions as to the making of his will, saying that he " felt death in him." The instructions, as a matter of course, he got ; and almost equally, as matter of course, proceeded not to make the will. This was about the opening of the winter session in November, which always involved for him hard, continuous, and somewhat harassing work. He was looking as fresh and well as ever in his life ; and to no .soul could it be evident that he should not undertake it as usual— as accordingly he did. But it might seem to have been too much for him. Shortly after we heard he was laid up ill ; MEMOIR. xcv then that his illness was serious ; then that it had determined itself into typhoid fever, com- plicated with diphtheria. One of these might have been enough for him to struggle with ; both of them proved too much. He was laid up on the 20th November; on the morning of 5th Janu- ary 1867 he quite peacefully died, with those he loved watching round him. It is needless to say that, throughout his illhess, he had the best medical advice which Edinburgh could bestow (and in the world there is perhaps no better), the best tendance which could be furnished by the solicitudes of those who loved him. But all would not avail ; he died, as above said. How does one feel on such an occasion } Taking a survey of the survivors, a little bewil- dered, like Lear, and not quite able to grasp the "dispensation:" " Why should a clog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all ?" Of the blank which was left by his death in the very wide circle of his friends, I do not in the least care to write. Of the blank yet deeper and sadder in the circle of those to whom he was endeared by ties yet closer and dearer, no sen- xcvi MEMOIR. sible person will ever in any such case even dream of trying to write. Where, in truth, can ever be the sense or the use of such a thing- ? The love which is true, deep, and unselfish, is in secret its own best comforter ; and, in subtle and unsuspected ways, ministers to itself a finer and softer solace than sympathy, so called, can ever do, imperfect when most sincere. In the memory of the loved and lost — 'When the agony of the ivj'cnch is overpast — a " tender grace" and charm abides, making sadness, and sorrow itself, as precious as the living joy. The music is, indeed, for ever dead upon the strings ; but they cannot cease to vibrate strangely to echoes of it, lingering and far prolonged, and infinitely tender and sweet. Yet if sympathy, idle as in much it always is, may now and then be held appropriate, here it was surely due. Within two days of Smith's death, news from Skye arrived that good old Ord — Mrs Smith's father — was also suddenly dead. Her mother she had lost only three months before. Only some two months later, beside poor Smith, where he sleeps, was laid his eldest born ; his first little pet daughter Flora, whose arrival is so sweetly alluded to in MEMOIR. xcvii his beautiful lyric " Blaavin." Seldom to any- household comes so sore a complication of be- reavement. Except as it is mercifully ap- pointed that great sorrows coming together in some strange way absorb and neutralise one another, people in such wretched conjunctions as this would have either to go mad or die. Of Shakespeare as a man we know but little ; and those of us who make a point of never writing of him, except as always and in every- thing " Divine," do not know much more of him as a Poet. What is known of Shakespeare as a man amounts to little more than this — that nearly every one who knew him loved him. As to tJiis the consensus of testimony is complete. The greatest Genius of all time was not, as such, at all known or cared for at " the Mermaid." Had you under that title asked for him at the door there, it is quietly my own notion Ben Jonson would have probably come reeling out upon you. He was known there as "sweet Will Shakespeare," " gentle ^N\\\ ;" or, as Spenser, in his " Tears of the Muses," calls him., " Our pleasant Willy."* How sweetly seems the phrase * It has been maintained that Spenser's reference here is to Sydney as " Willy," a supposed shepherd in a pastoral ; and xcviii MEMOIR. to fondle him! — "our Willy!" What nice in- sinuation of heart in that! — yours and mine; our own true friend and brother. So, most emphatically, also of Alexander Smith. It was never alleged, even by the most ecstatic of his earlier critics, that, in point of Genius, Smith was quite equal to Shakespeare ; but if I am willing to suppose that Shakespeare — as " sweet" and " gentle" I do not greatly doubt as lie — was also as true, and honest, and good, I consider I pay Shakespeare a very high compliment indeed. None of Smith's friends that I know of ever made much of his Genius ; nor is it worth while at all to speak of it here. That he %oas, in some very distinct sense, a man of Genius, I myself do not doubt, nor would I care to argue the matter with a critic who should dispute the claim for him. As to the precise nature and limits of his Genius — how far he effectively utilised it — and the sub- stantive value of the results a? they lie before it is alleged, in proof of this, that Sydney elsewhere undeniably is so alluded to. The context looked to, the thing will not bear two minutes' discussion. That Shakespeare is here intended, is as unquestionable as if it had never been questioned, or could be so. MEMOIR. xcix us, there may quite reasonably be room for con- siderable differences of opinion. But about his Genius, as I said, his friends never greatly cared : it was seldom made subject of conversation to him ; and when I said that the one man he rather eschewed was the prolix and wise bore and blockhead, I forgot that there was another — the fool who might be feared, as likely to voci- ferate applause upon him. This kind of person, I rather think, if sufficiently diligent in his opera- tions, could have caused him rather sharp annoy- ance. It is almost needless to say, the circle of his friends — properly so called — included no such nuisance. It included, on the other hand, several Aristarchs, whose cool insolence to him, in such matters, nearly rivalled that of his early friend Macdonald ; and with whom he was always delighted to discuss the points of criti- cism, perfectly resolute where he felt himself to be in the right — candid as the day in admission of any little flaw, which, as really such, he would recognise with curiously exceptional readiness. The best thing ever likely to be said of Smith's genius is, that those — and there were many such — who, because of it, were led to make his acquaintance, so soon as they sue- MEMOIR. ceeded in doing so, found that they forgot all about it ; that the "Author of the ' Life-Drama' " presently came to seem to them a comparatively poor creature, and, indeed, disappeared entirely, leaving behind him, as substitute, "the human- hearted man we loved." It would not, I think, have been possible to find a man more entirely simple and amiable. Great warmth of affection ; great truth of it (the two are unhappily not always conjoined) ; and, as holding of truth, steadfastness— \\(is was the man's deepest and most distinctive peculiarity. He could as little have been untrue to a friend, as unworthily have befouled an enemy (supposing him to have had one, of which I am not aware). Friendship may in two ways be compromised. You may have done something so dreadful — swindled your creditors, let us say— as to make all discreet Christians shy of you. Even had he chanced to be a creditor, I don't think that with Smith a little peccadillo of this kind would have made any very great difference. He was no very rigorous censor morum ; of any mores, that is, except his own, of which he always made excel- lent censorship. On that side you might con- sider yourself pretty safe with him. On the MEMOIR. ci other side, of small touchiness in himself; sus- picions ; uneasy broodings and hatchings over questionable points of conduct which might seem to require explanation, you might hold yourself equally safe. There was a certain largeness of nature in the man — a magnanimity,* I will say — it is a dreadfully big word to use, yet the right one — which made him free of all that sort of thing — the poison of noble inter- course. Consequently, admitted to his friend- ship, you might consider you were in for a spell of it ; in fact, there did not seem any way in * In the excellent Memoir of Smith — of which I have every- where freely made use — contributed to Good Words by his friend Mr Alexander Nicholson, Skye-man and Advocate, this word "magnanimous" is used of him. I quite remember, in reading it, recognising its fine pertinence — though surely never among men can so grand a virtue have exhibited itself in more still and simple guise. Magnanimity ! largeness of soul and nature ; that elevated cast of mind, to which, precisely because great things are great, little things are little ! It is not a British virtue — our whole Society being obviously ruled on the principle, that little things being accounted great, great things are to be held little. Oddly enough, Smith had it ; and it is really so much a virtue, that almost a Vice with it is better than a Virtue 'cuithoiit. The things which were great to him were Poetry, and generally the intellectual business, prosecuted simply and for itself ; this, and what with him was fundamental to this, duty and the quick life of the affections. So far as I could ever read the man, nothing else was of any really vital concernment to him. G 2 cii MEMOIR. which, had you even wished it so, the relation could ever, as the lawyers say, " cease and deter- mine." It would not have been quite easy so to offend Smith as to lead him to perpetrate rup- ture with one whom he held his friend. Some sort of obviously studied and deliberate ifisiilt to him, would, in fact, have been your only way out of the entanglement. In years of close intercourse with him, I cannot remember that ever there came between us so much as a start or flaw of uneasiness — no mighty inference of virtue, I admit, on the one side, but more or less, I should really fear, on the other. And I am nearly positive, every other friend he had of tried standing would say precisely the same thing.* * As instance of his tolerance in such a relation, I remember that once in a skittish mood, I expressly satirized him in the columns of the Scotsman — which in Edinburgh is somewhat as if in London you found, on going to your Club, all the readers of the Times on the giggle at you. It was a propos of some poor American Poet who had plainly gone mad over the "Life- Drama;" and I said that, as the unhappy creature was no doubt ere this in a strait-waistcoat, with his mother weeping over him, Mr Smith had really a great deal to answer for ; moreover, that if Mr Smith would glance into the work, perhaps it might be of use to him, as seeing in it — pretty much as one's fine features are given back to one in a silver spoon — something much more likely to do him good than anything he ever saw in his mirror of a morning — some wretched ribaldry of that kind. This he did MEMOIR. ciii And in this, his extreme amiabihty, he was really entitled to some credit ; for, as one of the "genus irritable" there was in him a thrill of irritable fibre, making him one with others of the race, wretched themselves by reason of it — combined with a small self-seeking vanity — and ministers of wretchedness to others. But as having in him no taint of the last, the other was in Smith so neutralised, that it would not sur- prise me to learn I am held to do him wrong, in hinting here that he had any of it. Neither was his almost unfailing mildness that of a weak ^nd negative nature incapable of a manly self-asser- not quite relish. " O, hang it !" he said to a friend, " this is going a Httle too far. Hang me, if I stand this kind of thing. I must really pull the fellow up." When I met him, and asked if he had seen the compliment I had paid him, he said — trying to pinch his bland face into a just severity, and almost ludicrously failing : " O yes — I've seen it — and it's all very funny, no doubt" (a fine broad grin of forgiveness expanding over his features ;) very clever, I dare say, you think it ; but just don't do it again, old fellow ! that's all. If you do — " the dreadful threat was never uttered ; he knew it would only be laughed at ; farther, he knew as well as I did, that if the thing were next week repeated, it could lead to nothing but a repetition of the easy transaction in progress. It was not by a little offence of this kind, repeated as often as you pleased, that you could have forfeited the good- will of Alexander Smith, or stirred into any kind of gall against you that sweetness which was born in the blood. civ MEMOIR. tion. He could assert himself pretty promptly on occasion ; and more than once I have known him do so, manifestly much to the surprise of the person — and it did not greatly matter who he was — who found himself — metaphorically, of course, — so sharply taken by the throat. Insult he would have brooked from no man ; but he must have been almost a brute who would have offered offence in this kind to one himself so inoffensive. Yet, if I should suspect a fault in him, it was here, in a certain deficiency in the acrid and evil emotions. He did not make any enemies. I wish he had made z.few; only one or two to go about expressing an active detestation of him, would a little, in my mind, have contributed a finishing grace to his character. I could never quite catch his secret ; or see how it was he con- trived to go about and never make himself dis- agreeable to anybody — in a world, too, abounding with malefactors, to whom it is almost one's duty to be disagreeable. Partly, perhaps, this helped him to it : he was a man not heavily weighted with convictions. In politics, for instance — the great Whig and Tory wrangle — his interest was precisely — nil. I don't think he ever even read I MEMOIR. cv these " Speeches" other people make so much of; and perhaps, in his intellectual developments, he did not by this greatly suffer. With Religion, as a topic of social discussion, he quite declined to meddle ; indeed, as such, he plainly disliked the subject, and, keeping himself carefully away from it, naturally avoided all risk of incurring the savage ill-will of those with whom he might have chanced to differ on some trivial point of docrma or other. Elsewhere it was the same. The proposition that Man is a developed Mollusc, when laid down over the wine and walnuts, stirred in him no vehemence of angry antipathy. Badgered into saying something of it, he would probably say he knew that Man was Man, and did not care to know any more, that being the really important article of belief ; — farther, perhaps, that, so far as he could see, nobody ever wouldknov^ any more. On all such questions of the Mollusc, he himself was so perfectly a molluscous animal, he almost went some way to prove the theory. As to the claims of the Nigger again, his indifference was entire and contemptuous ; but he would allow the fiery Abolitionist to rage along upon his sable hobby perfectly unchecked — not caring enough about the matter, one way or the other, cvi MEMOIR. to lead him at all to interfere in it. And the " Nigger" may stand as representative of all the other great " Causes" which set men together by the ears. I fear he was but a cool philanthropist in anything of the large and sublime sense ; and I can suppose him giving now and then a penny to a poor starving child in the street, who reminded him of his little ones at home, though doubtless theoretically aware that in so doing, precisely to the extent of the penny's worth, he was sacrificing " the happiness of the greatest number." Nothing of all this am I alleging as if in his honour ; something is per- haps to be said for it, and, 'undoubtedly, a good deal against. I am simply noting that this was the kind of man he was, and explaining to my- self how it was that — as with no outfit of fana- tical convictions of his own — he could go on so quietly as he did, not treading upon other people's gouty toes of conviction, and thus sin- gularly without offence to any one. Of all good Scotchmen born, surely Alexander Smith was the very least of a Fanatic, either in the good or the bad sense ; and verily he had his reward, in the cloudless and beautiful serenity throughout, of his relations with his fellow-men. MEMOIR. cvii In his way of life, by testimony of all who ever knew him, Smith was throughout a man of unusual discretion and correctness, tried by the strictest conventional standard ; and here also he had some credit, inasmuch as his correctness was wisdom of strong self-rule, and by no means the merely negative virtue, bred of thinness and meagreness of nature, and lack of all exuberance of impulse. There was in him no taint of the Puritan ; and of "the gifts the gods provide" he had a genial and manly enjoyment ; but he used them as not abusing, and seldom, indeed, in anything, was known to transgress the rule of the Jie quid niinis. That now and then, and as merely in the round of human experience, he may have "heard the chimes at midnight," is assumed in this, as matter of course. So sedate a man, in fact, was he that, on this ground, his title to rank as a Genius has seriously been called in question. Only the other evening, I heard one of his oldest friends — a Genius somewhat eccentric — depreciate his Poetry from this point of view. His notion was, that Genius in general, and Poetical power in particular, are of needs allied with the more desperate forms of blackguardism ; and this he went on to illustrate cviii MEMOIR. copiously from the records left us of the Gifted. Consequently — such was his line of reasoning — as Smith's dearest friend could not make out any case for a moment to be listened to, entitling him to rank as a scoundrel, the inference was clear — the critics must have made a mistake in supposing he could possibly be a Poet. The syllogism seems to be perfect ; and certainly, if its Major be admitted, the Minor being quite indisputable, the conclusion was, by rigour of logic, arrived at. On the other hand, Smith's Genius being admitted to start with, his friend's Major premiss of Theory might be held, by equal rigour of logic, demolished. And what- ever we make of this Theory of Genius being a mode of blackguardism — there seems to be a good deal in it, if we do not push it too far — it received no countenance whatever from the practice of Alexander Smith. If it be critically ruled, that on that account he cannot have been a man of Genius, be it so. He did not leave behind him a friend who, from this point of view, however anxious to do so, can find a word to say for his Poetry. Having said so much of him, it is almost needless I should say farther, that Smith was MEMOIR. cix one of the most delightful of companions. In anything like formal company — for which he did not greatly care — he was not rightly to be relished, though he can scarce anywhere have been held to be otherwise than a pleasant and agreeable man. But in any little circle of his intimates, he radiated round him warmth and easy satisfaction. When I knew him in his early days, an occasional mood of gloom and abstrac- tion might be noted in him ; and half suspecting him at times of doing the " Author of the Life- Drama " upon us, I took the liberty to quiz him accordingly, when we had become sufficiently intimate. (I need not say how completely, on farther acquaintance, I acquitted him of any such affectation.) In his later time, these moods — slight and transient as they were — had quite disappeared, and his was eminently, and at all times, a cheery presence — though, by nature au fond, I should suppose him to have been always a somewhat brooding, meditative, and sad man. This only revealed itself, however, in the pleasant reaction and protest of Jiianour, which was one of the ruling qualities of his mind, and, had he lived, would probably more and more have announced itself dominant. As it is, in anything he wrote, ex MEMOIR. there is only some hint or suggestion of his really fine gift in that direction. Characteristi- cally, his humour was of the quiet and not of the explosive sort ; anything ludicrous — and in this kind he missed nothing — you could see he was rolling quietly under his tongue, as it were ; nursing it as a nice morsel, till he had sucked its inmost sweet. It was rather by sympathy with this in him, than in anything he would actively produce to make you " roar and laugh," as they say, that his humour became enjoyable ; and how enjoyable it was, how pleasantly it flavoured the man, so to speak, interfused as a genial element throughout his whole speech and ways, all his really close friends must forget him — if that in the least were possible — before they cease to remember. Of his conversation a word or two may suffice. On his return from London, on my asking him about that of Mr Helps, he answered as nearly as possible thus : " Pretty much what his books would have led me expect of him — not specially remarkable, as not at all caring to be so — ^just the careless, easy, intelli- gent talk of a cultivated English gentleman, with now and then a noticeably good and happy thing dropped lightly into it unawares, and as if MEMOIR. cxi he himself did not know ; " and some instances of these he gave, which I don't remember, and ought not to repeat if I did. This seems pretty- narrowly to hit his own perfectly unstudied, unsolicitous, carelessly-articulated talk. In its way it was very pleasant ; most so, perhaps, when by himself you could get him to flow forth to any extent on matters literary. On Poetry in particular, it might well be supposed preg- nant, as, with a very nice critical eye, he had read widely and exactly. I should suppose him to have been in this branch one of the very best read men in Scotland. And in the other literary branches, if not so supremely, he was yet un- usually well informed. One only he eschewed, somewhat as by instinct an animal declines a food unsuited to it — Metaphysics and Mental Philosophy. Of these he declined to talk, ex- cept in terms of obstinate distaste and con- tempt. As to reading anything of the kind, not even a strong call of duty and friendship — as when possibly one or other of his allies, casually immersed in these bewilderments, would present him with a poor little volume — could prevail with him to seriously attempt such a thing. He would profess to have tried to read ; and his criticism cxii MEMOIR. would, on such an occasion, be thus compendi- ously conveyed : " Do you really suppose, my good fellow, that I'm going to bother my brain with stuff of tliat kindV-' — this with a certain vice, as if he really resented the waste of time incurred in his abortive attempt. This obstinate antipathy always struck me as curious ; inas- much as readers who know such a thing when they see it, will frequently take note in his writings of a nice philosophic intuition. But of anything like exact logical process he was in- tolerant. Consequently, he hated argument on all subjects ; on religious topics more particu- larly ; and, indeed, about religion he almost utterly declined, in any form whatever, to talk. He has been styled a " reticent" man ; this, I think, he only otherwise was, as not insisting on boring his friends with matters which were strictly his own concern : but on tliis subject he 1VCLS reticent to a degree. It showed his strong good sense, I think ; as not likely to throw any new lights upon the subject, it was as well for him to hold his peace about it. Doubtless he thought much of it, saying, as he did, so little. That his mode of thought was entirely reverent ; that of wreverence you heard from himself no MEMOIR. cxiii word ; that he disHked it in others, and actively detested it when so expressed as to take any form of social outrage ; that, finally, he was no very positive Philosopher, or " intellectual all-in- all," and considered the Ignotum, with its grand possibilities, rather more entitled to respect than the devoloped 2 + 2 = 4, which is the sum of all of our Science ; farther, that unless in some distinct sense, he had held to the faith of the Christian, he would scarcely — so sincere a man as he was — have written as he did in the " Christmas " Essay in " Dream- thorp" — this is, I should say, about all that any one ever knew of the religion of Alex- ander Smith. As I said, he could scarcely be got to talk at all on the subject. In his steady avoidance of every theological topic, his ob- stinate indisposition to '" Metapheesics," and eschewing of every form of pertinacious and wrangling dialectic, he was a positive disgrace to his country. And in truth, taken all over, there was a good deal in him that almost might be Held to approximate to the English rather than the Scotch type of understood cha- racter. He was, it may be hoped, however, Scotch enough to have considered that, in say- cxiv MEMOIR. ing this, you paid him no very astonishing com- pliment With considerable distress throughout, I have found myself elaborating a sketch, with a dread- ful suspicion of the "Ideal" about it; of "the self-less man and stainless gentleman " who figures in Mr Tennyson's Poem, and is not often to be met with out of it. And I have anxiously considered and cast about, as wishing a good strong shadow or two to dash into the picture, were it only to make it something rather more like a work of Art. But, almost to my grief, I found they were not to be had in nature, and not even in the interests of art could I think myself entitled to invent them. I am not, however, in the least alarmed lest my sketch should be held idealised by those who personally and intimately knew the simple and homely reality from which it is studied. Faint and inadequate it must needs be — on that side I willingly admit deficiency ; but to all such I confidently appeal against suspicion of having traced in it a single line of exaggeration, or exercised the smallest art of either suppression or extenuation. In fact, there was nothing to extenuate or suppress. As Art, my performance may be wretched ; but MEMOIR. cxv it does not profess to be Art, but only simplicity of Nature and truth ; and as such, except on some ground of inadequacy in execution, I know it quite safe from impeachment. As regards Smith's relations with the Uni- versity, remarks have been made before the public from which there seemed to be inference of his feeling himself uncomfortable there, as not quite treated as he should be. I am bound to say that for these I am aware of no just foundation in anything I ever heard from him- self Yet, inasmuch as there was really a ground from which misconception might arise, a brief word or two seems almost to be called for on the subject Frankly, then, latterly the College business had got to bore him somewhat more than it did in his earlier time. (This pheno- menon of growing boredom with strangling monotonies of life is not, I should suppose, peculiar to the duties of the Secretary of the Edinburgh University.) The situation, always, it seems to me, fairly suitable for him, as giving him a basis to proceed upon, did not in this sense now quite so approve itself to him as it Jiad done. The duties had gradually been getting heavier; and, latterly, cxvi MEMOIR. had come to include little points of duty, for discharge of which a just taste would, perhaps, have ruled that the Porter at the gate was, on the whole, the more proper person. Farther, as I said, for the last year or two of his life he was working under morbid conditions, which precluded him from quite enjoying, as before, the element of humour in such things. In a word, he had got just a little weary and sick of the whole concern. I surmise so, as supplementing ox producing, so to phrase it, the casually- dropped remarks of a man so entirely unqueru- lous, so little given to complaint as he. He had some dream of a sheep-farm in Skye ; and to the obvious objection that his knowledge of sheep was nil, except in the form of mutton, he did not seem disposed to give due weight. This scheme ran much in his mind, and, had he lived a year or two longer, would almost cer- tainly have been carried out, with results Ar- cadian or otherwise. Probably, I should say, otherwise. In his taking up with this project I seemed to apprehend the Poet rather than the practician, and man of calm, strong sense he on all other matters exhibited himself It gives us, MEMOIR. cxvii however, pretty accurately the measure of the distaste he had got to feel for the University. But that, in his personal relations in that quarter, there was ever anything unpleasant, not positively inevitable to the position, very strong evidence indeed would be needed to make me believe. And of such evidence, I venture to say, none will ever be produced. Of his relations with the general body of the Professors, I know not very much. Of a good many of them I have heard him speak in terms of true liking and kindliness. Of no one of them did I ever hear him speak ^//kindly. His relations with Aytoun have al- ready been alluded to ; and with Aytoun he had much pleasant intercourse.* Even if not specially alluding to the University, I could scarce have * An instance being known to me in which Aytoun's kind feeling towards Smith took a very practical and business form, it may not be amiss to commemorate it. Some little time after Smith's marriage, the Professor came to him one morning in his room at College, and addressed him in effect somewhat thus — "You're now married, Smith, and have got a household and family to care for. What we give you here is, sooth to say, no very fat provision. I'oetry is well ; but it don't pay for the most part. Why not try a little Prose?" (This was before Smith had to any extent taken into that line, or cultivated a Magazine connection.) " Suppose you write something for Blackwood ; try; write the stuff, and let me know when you H 2 cxviii MEMOIR. avoided allusion to the terms of really frank, easy, and cordial friaidsJiip, on which, from the first and throughout, he stood with Professor Blackie ; and with more of the body I should sup- pose him to have been pretty intimate. If others of them did not greatly heed him, this might seem to be pretty much in the nature of the case ; and it may be held to be equally in the nature of it, that quite as little did he them — which seems all that need be said on the subject. As to the other subject — in regard of which unnecessary remarks have also been laid before the public — as to how far from Edinburgh "Society" he met with the "recognition" to which he was entitled, a few brief words may dispose of it. Of siicJi recog- nition he had always quite as much as he cared send it in. I'll do what I can for you in that quarter, and I don't much doubt I'll be able to get it admitted. Thereafter as may be. An occasional cheque coming in, of fifteen or twenty guineas, under these new conditions, might not perhaps inconvenience you." The paper was written accordingly, sent in, admitted, . and followed by one or two more ; and though the relation with Blackwood did not take a fprm of permanence, this was not Aytoun's fault — nor did I ever hear of fault any^vhere — and can no wav affect our estimate of his thoughtful kindness. So much for the hearty relation which subsisted between Smith and his literary foe of " Firmilian." The trait is to Aytoun so honour- able, that it seems as well here to set it down. MEMOIR. cxix for, or could quite conveniently manage; and sup- posing he had had none at all, what then ? With matters so entirely despicable, that in life the man could never possibly have "filed his mind"* with them, it would be foolish to defile his grave. I have written to little purpose, if it has not be- come plain to the reader, that of necessity the man's life must have been lived some considerable way above that not very elevated atmosphere which is breathed by Edinburgh Society. Smith's grave, above alluded to, is in Warris- ton Cemetery, about half way between the city and the sea. Over it, by the tender care of a circle of his friends, has been erected a Runic cross, distinguished by its singular beauty and the grace of its appropriate decorations. It was executed under the superintendence of his friends. Sir J. Noel Paton and Mr James Drum- mond, R.S. A., by the latter of whom, as a tribute of affection to the Poet, the beautiful design was furnished. The medallion likeness in bronze is from the hand of his friend Mr William * "For BanquSs issue have I filed my niinJ.'' — Macbeth. One of the constantly recurring instances in which Shakespeare writes excellent ScoUh. Filed — tlirtied, or, as we say in English, ,A- filed. cxx MEMOIR. Brodie, R.S.A., sculptor. "Alexander Smith, Poet and Essayist. Erected by some of his personal friends." Such is the simple inscrip- tion. There is on it besides nothing of text or epigraph ; and it struck me, in noting the deficiency, that had such a thing been wanted, a good one might readily have been found. It is not to Scripture I should have gone for it, but to one of the grand old Ballads which he himself so loved. I almost wish the stone, to those who might chance to look on it, had chanted this little burden — " A kindly Scot lies here."* A kindly Scot — thus it was that in the noble pathos of the old minstrel, the Douglas who died at Otterbourne had last thought of himself, as the brave blood and life ebbed together ; the spirit, tender as heroic, exhaling itself in that sweet, sad farewell sigh of brotherhood to those he left. Thus it was that Alexander Smith would have wished, above all, by his fellow-men to be remembered. "A kindly Scot !" A Scot O ! bury me by the bracken bush. Beneath the bloomin' brier ; Let never livin' mortal ken That a kindly Scot lies here." MEMOIR. cxxi with all the best virtue of the race in him, and as little as might be of its defect— withal, of such a depth of honest quiet heart and kindliness, as must be rare among men of any race. Most essentially the Man is given in that ; excepting only his Genius, which is not, by comparison, important, and would never to himself have seemed so. In concluding a sketch which has strayed much beyond the limits intended, so as seriously to sin against the law of proportion in the book, I have simply to say some word or two of its contents. The Essay on " Scottish Ballad Poetry" was contributed in 1857 to a volume of "Edin- burgh University Essays," and might be said to be the writer's first serious attempt in Prose. As it stands, he himself would certainly not have reprinted it ; in fact, I have heard him pooh- pooh it not a little, saying he should like to have it to do over again, as confident he could make a very much better thing of it. For kind permis- sion to make use of it, the Publisher has to thank Messrs A. & C. Black, with whom is the copy- right of the volume. To Messrs T. & T. Clark his thanks are also due for the paper on " Essayists Old and New," which is taken with permission cxxii MEMOIR. from the NortJi British Review. The shorter papers appeared in Good J Vofds and Tlie Argosy, and were thus the property of Messrs Strahan and Co., \\\\o with ready kindness have allowed them to be here reproduced. They have been se- lected on no principle save that of simply giving in series the last things of the kind produced by the writer. The paper on " Sydney Dobell" is, in this way, the very last thing he wrote. During the summer, Dobell had again visited Edinburgh, and after a separation of years, the two Poets had renewed their intimacy on the old affectionate terms. This must have suggested the paper. Some of the pieces are slight, and that on " Lite- rary Work" is not only slight, but, as I think, so one-sided, if not entirely erroneous in doctrine, that I had some thought of excluding it. But on second thoughts I allowed it to remain, if only to mark more distinctly the point of view from which it is meant that the volume should be regarded. While criticism is not of course deprecated, in no sense is it intended as a docu- ment on which to found an estimate of Smith as a Prose writer. As such let him be judged by the books which he himself gave to the world. For the issue of the present one, a good deal of MEMOIR. cxxiii which is obviously no more than what I have called the spray of the writer's mind, I only am responsible; and if in issuing it I have judged amiss, the Virgilian in me convertite fernim, seems naturally enough to suggest itself Smith himself, sleeping very quietly about half-a-mile from where I now write, will not the least be distressed by anything ill-natured said of him ; that sort of thing did not much pain him while he lived, and now it cannot at all pain him'; on which ground it will probably be obvious to the critics, that good wit need not be wasted on him. It is my hope that to a sufficient circle of readers, interested in the writer, as aforetime having drawn delight from the products of his graceful pen, these Essays, as they now re-appear, will need no justification. P. P. A. iL=sp SCOTTISH BALLADS. GREEK girl traced the shadow of her lover's face on a sunny wall. That, says the legend, was the birth of painting. The death of one of the lions of the early world may have given birth to the twin arts of poetry and music. The barbarian return- ing to his village laden with the spoils of the chase, or driving before him a crowd of captives, must have a poet to rehearse his triumphs, to celebrate the strength of his arm and the terrors of his unconquerable spear. To some such rude source we may trace back the sacred streams of poetry and music which have flowed down to us out of unknown time. From his power of conferring a new distinction on warlike achievements, the bard or singer has ever been SCOTTISH BALLADS. held in respect. His songs are a kind of rude fame. He is the depositary of the traditions of his tribe. His memory is the archives of his people, and therein are preserved their rolls of glory. We find the singer in every ancient nation, by the rainy shores of the Baltic, in the vast Germanic forests ; and everywhere he is regarded as one possessing surpassing know- ledge, who has mysterious kindred with the elements, and who, in solitary places, hears the messages of the gods. He passes from land to land, walks into the heart of hostile camps, and sits down at the very carousals of his foes. He finds a welcome in the den of the robber, and in the rush-strewn hall of the prince. When at rich and solemn feast the monarch is seated on the dais surrounded by his earls, there is also the minstrel with his harp. What were a banquet without song and the recital of the deeds of heroes } The wild boar's flesh is tasteless, the mead is ditch-water; it cannot fire the blood, nor tingle to the brain. In course of time chivalry brought the Troubadour, a more courtly and splendid personage than his predecessor, who knew another god than Odin, believed in quite a different Valhalla, and relished softer pleasures SCOTTISH BALLADS. than drinking ale out of the skulls of departed warriors. Some of these men were soldiers as well as minstrels, and were cunning Avith the sword as with the harp-string. On the morning of Hastings, Taillefer asked and obtained per- mission from William to lead the onset. He sang in a loud voice the " Song of Roland " in the front of the Norman army ; then, striking spurs into his horse, he rode forward still sing- ing, and dashed his life out in an ecstasy on the Saxon spears. After the Conquest, the English kings were great patrons of poets and minstrels, and some of them were no mean brethren of the craft, and could touch the harp themselves. Richard I. was an accomplished musician, and composed verses. The story how one of the king's minstrels, Blondell by name, rescued his master from captivity, is familiar to most readers. It was known in England that Richard had returned from Palestine, but no one could tell in what country he was detained. Blondell tra- velled through many lands in search of the king, till his wanderings led him one day to a strong castle. On inquiry he learned that the fortress belonged to the Duke of Austria, and that it contained a single prisoner ; but no one could SCOTTISH BALLADS. tell him his name. The minstrel took up his place beneath one of the grated windows, and began to sing a song in French, which he and the king had at one time composed together. Richard started when the familiar tones fell upon his ear, and recognised Blondell's voice. He immediately took up the strain, and sang the remaining half. By that token Blondell knew it was the king, and, returning to England, discovered to the barons where their master was imprisoned. In the reign of Richard II. a court of minstrels was established, which obtained a charter, had power to enact laws, and every year elected a king to preside over them. By the time of Elizabeth the craft had fallen into dis- repute, the minstrel was profanely classed with " rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars," and seems to have been better acquainted with the stafif of the constable than with the tables of the rich or the favour of princes. Although more emphatically the home of minstrelsy than Eng- land, we have but little information relative to the worldly prosperity of the minstrels in Scot- land. Celtic bards, we know, frequently left their mountains and wandered through the Low- lands singing their wild songs, and the inhabi- SCOTTISH BALLADS. 5 tants of the Borders were passionately fond of listening to strains in which the struggles of clans and the forays into England were cele- brated. Some provision appears to have been made for poets or musicians among the Celtic tribes ; a piper seems to have been as indis- pensable to a Highland chieftain as a claymore or eagle's feather ; and a portion of the land of the tribe, called the " piper's croft," was set apart for the support of that important indivi- dual. In the Lowlands the poets seem to have found few royal favours. Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay resided at court, and although the first was sometimes attached to the train of a noble when he visited France on an embassy of state, and the second was honoured by bearing a young prince on his back, he meanwhile romping about on all-fours, they do not seem to have lived in the most flourishing condition. A con- siderable portion of their poetry is of the beg- ging-letter species. If wit and eloquence had had power to charm coin from the pocket of the king, theirs had been better supplied. It is to be hoped that the poets were the most trouble- some duns of the Jameses, else the unfortunate monarchs must have frequently been at the end SCOTTISH BALLADS. of their royal wits. It is hardly to be expected, however, that a line of kings, of lineage unex- ceptionable and most irreproachable blood, some of whom were occasionally hard-pushed in the matter of silk stockings, could afford to be generous to singing men and singing women — to poets, jesters, and buffoons. But it was not from the court poets that the Ballads sprung. They grew up over the country like wildflowcrs. Their authors were most pro- bably part minstrels, part gaberlunzies, who wandered about the kingdom, dwelling often "under the canopy with the choughs and crows," haunting fairs, markets, and all assemblies of people, and when fortunate enough to procure a supper and a couch of straw, paying their law- ing with a song, and then forward on the morrow ; and often, doubtless, we should find the minstrel equipped iu the steel jacket of the moss-trooper, urging a drove of floundering and terrified cattle before him from Cumberland on a moonless night, with many a prick of lance and a great superfluity of curses. Many of the Border Ballads are so real and life-like, so full of character and humour, that we feel as if the singer had himself wielded a sword in the combat, or ridden into SCOTTISH BALLADS. England to lift a prey. The form of this kind of poetry is of course necessitated by the cir- cumstances of the minstrel and his audience. It was meant to be sung on public occasions to the harp or some other musical instrument, and in order to produce effect and sustain in- terest, the theme must be some exploit which flashed out far above common raid and the skirmish of rival clans — some surpassing tragedy which steeped a whole country-side in tears. The story claimed, too, to be told in the most direct and natural manner, and the lighter poetic graces — ornaments and efflorescences, precious and delightful enough in a calmer hour — were scared away by the fury of the minstrel's hand and voice. These compositions — and some of them are very ancient — were not, till a com- paratively recent period, preserved by printing ; living, therefore, on the lips and in the memories of several generations, and sung extensively over a country where, even at the present day, every twenty or thirty miles you come upon a dialect locally peculiar, it is not surprising that in pro- cess of time they underwent considerable modi- fications ; that we frequently find half-a-dozen versions of the same story, and several stanzas 8 SCOTTISH BALLADS. of one ballad imbedded in tlie very heart of another. When a minstrel met a brother of the craft, they would in all probability exhibit their stock-in-trade, and both thereby acquire fresh materials. The meeting over, and reciting his novelties in distant parts of the country, if memory failed, the singer who could not afford to pause in his strain would hardly hesitate to thrust into the hiatus any set of stanzas which, without outrage to the proprieties of the story, carried along with it the feelings of his audience. In these compositions there are great similarities of incident and feeling. One thing at least never fails the reader : when two lovers die they are of course buried together; and out of the grave of one there springs a rose, and out of the grave of the other a briar, which, rapidly growing, con- trive, as a sort of poetical justice and compensa- tion for their cruel fate, to interlace and marry their branches above the spire of the church — a spectacle which, however it might astonish people now-a-days, seems to have had the most touching associations for the grim moss-trooper and the lawless reiver of the marches. None of these Ballads can be looked upon as the work of a single author. Their present form is the work SCOTTISH BALLADS. of generations. For centuries the floating legendary material was reshaped, added to, and altered, by the changing spirit and emotion of man. Rude and formless, they are touching and venerable as some ruin on the waste, the names of whose builders are unknown ; whose towers and walls, although not erected in accordance with the lights of modern architecture, affect the spirit and fire the imagination far more than nobler and more recent piles ; for its chambers, now roofless to the day, were ages ago tenanted by life and death, joy and sorrow ; for its walls have been worn and rounded by time, its stones channelled and fretted by the fierce tears of winter rains ; on broken arch and battlement every April for centuries has kindled a light of desert flowers, and it stands muffled in ivy, bearded with moss, and stained with lichens, crimson, golden, and green by the suns of for- gotten summers. We are told to imitate this ; but who can recall the strong arms and rude hearts that piled huge stone on stone } Who can simulate the hallowing of time .'' Who can create us a ruin to-day with the weather-wear and lichens of five centuries upon it ? The Scottish Ballads may be divided into two lo SCOTTISH BALLADS. classes: i. Those poems founded on historical events, private tragedies, and the fairy myth- ology. 2. Those which more specially pertain to the Borders, and relate the sturt and strife, the wild revenges, the exploits, skirmishes, and cattle-lifting expeditions of the marchmen. The first contains much of the finest poetry and the deepest pathos. Those of the second attend closely to the business in hand, are rude and bust- ling, and are frequently enlivened by flashes of savage humour. In every stanza you seem to hear the clatter of hoofs and the rattle of steel jackets. Both are valuable, as throwing light on a condition of man which can never recur in these islands ; as exhibiting in a mighty mirror pictures of a strong, passionate, turbulent time. Nowhere is the reader more impressed, not even on the page of Shakespeare himself, with the reality of the scenes and the men and women. Yet with all this naturalness, it is difficult for the reader of to-day, with his complex environments and difference of training, to imagine himself so actuated, so subdued by fears, so stormed along by passion. In reading these compositions, we see what we have gained and lost in the course of a few centuries, what new elements have SCOTTISH BALLADS. ii entered into human life, what more of awfuhiess or frivoHty, of truth or falsehood ; we discover the old sea-margins of right and wrong, and compare with them the point the tide reaches to-day. All that far-off, lawless, and generous life is unroofed to us in these Ballads ; we wander amongst the relics of a past society as we would amongst the ruins of Pompeii. We see the domestic economy of the houses of our ancestors ; everything is left there for our in- spection. We cart take up a household imple- ment and examine its material and shape. The first thing which strikes the reader of the Ballads is their direct and impulsive life. There is no- thing cloaked or concealed. You look through the iron corslet of the marauder, and see the fierce heart heave beneath. None of the heroes ever seems to feel that hesitancy and palsy of action which arises from the clash of complex and opposing motives. At once the mailed hand executes the impulse of the hot heart. There seem to have been no dissimulators in those days. If a man is a scoundrel, he speaks and acts as if he were perfectly aware of the fact, and aware, too, that the whole world knew it as well as himself. If a man is wronged by an- 12 SCOTTISH BALLADS. other, ho runs him through the body with his sword, or cleaves him to the chin with his pole- axe, and then flees, pursued day and night, awake and asleep, in town and wilderness, by a bloody ghost. If two lovers meet in the green- wood, they forget church and holy priest, and in course of time the heron is startled from his solitary haunt, and shame and despair are at rest beneath the long weeds of the pool, and a ghost with dripping hair glides into the chamber, and with hand of ice awakes the horrified be- trayer from his first sleep on his bridal night. And these men had their rude reverences and devotions, terrors of the solitary mountain-top and the moonless waste, wandering fires of the morass, spirits of the swollen stream : Edom o' Gordon, who burned a mother and her children in their own tower, with laughter and mockery, as if agony were a jest, would ere night mutter an Ave to Mary Mother, and cross himself as devoutly as ever a saint in the calendar ; and the moss-trooper who could impale an infant on his spear-point, would shiver at an omen which a schoolboy laughs at. These people were not afflicted with the maladies of hair-splitting and nice distinctions. A character like Hamlet's, SCOTTISH BALLADS. 13 where doubt balances resolve, and thought action, was impossible in those straight-forward days ; perhaps quite as well for Hamlet. Before he could have made up his mind how to act under the circumstances, the sweep of a sword- blade would have solved that and every other problem for him for ever. Public opinion had not come into their world to make men walk- gingerly as if upon knives, to add hypocrisy to vice, to rub the fine bloom off goodness, and to make a faiix pas worse than a crime. The wild eyes of passion, on whatever message she is bent, whether to kill or save, are seldom turned in the direction of the Decalogue. The full heart is its own law, its fluctuations its only creed ; and, describing these men and women, singing their tragedies, the ballad-monger fre- quently, in utter innocence and unconsciousness, and in words simple as the babble of childhood, goes to the inmost core of the matter like the inevitable arrow of a William Tell, and the tears are on our cheeks before we are aware. This is an art which the world has lost, and which cannot be recovered until centuries are can- celled, and knights are again pricking through the greenwood, ladies sitting among the roses 14 SCOTTISH BALLADS. of their bower-windows, and minstrels wander- ing through the country harp in hand. Society- is migratory, settHng age after age in different districts, with changing abodes and occupations ; and wherever she dwells, whether in the hut of the trapper, or in the glittering capitals of civilisation, Poetry must attend, and take de- light in representing the life which lies around the loghouse or the palace. The literary merit of many of these Ballads is great ; in the majority, the singer is in utter abeyance, and the subject is all in all. There is no straining or effort ; no artifices are em- ployed to fillip the dull spirit of the reader ; no impertinent ornaments distract the attention from the agony or the woe. Their authors were not literary men, and there was no existing literature by which their efforts were measured. Originality was not expected of them, and they were consequently never tempted to call grass purple, to avoid the imputation of plagiarism, some former writer having called it green. There were no critics to show up their failings and shortcomings, or to parade their good things — perhaps a line and a half in length — in italics, as the manner of some is. It may fairly be SCOTTISH BALLADS. 15 doubted whether the present time is favourable to the production of poetry of a high class ; not, as is commonly supposed, that there is anything necessarily unpoetical in the artificial state of society, in the eternal struggle and roar of labour, in the shifting of the points of interest from green fields and meadows, and the sweet goings on of pastoral life, to the joys, crimes, and tragedies of men congregated in thousands beneath the smoke of mighty towns ; but mainly from the greatness of existing literature, the pre- valence of criticism, and its immediate applica- tion to literary productions. In 1824 we find Goethe expressing himself in the following terms to Eckermann : — " And how could one get cou- rage only to put pen to paper, if one were con- scious, in an earnest appreciating spirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable excellences (as Shakespeare's waitings) were already in exis- tence ! ... It fared better with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany. I could soon come to an end with all that then existed ; it could not long awe me, or occupy my atten- tion. I soon left behind me German literature and the study of it, and turned my thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went in i6 SCOTTISH BALLADS. my own natural development, and on and on I fashioned the productions of epoch after epoch. And at every step of life and development ni}- standard of excellence was not much higher than what at such step I was able to attain. But had I been born an Englishman, and had all those numerous masterpieces been brought before me in all their power, at my first dawn of youthful consciousness, they would have over- powered me, and I should not have known what to do. I could not have gone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long time to find some new outlet." It is this seeking a "new outlet for oneself" which is the cause of nearly all the vices of contem- porary literature — of poetry especially. On it may be charged the strain and glitter, the forced and perverse originality, and the extra- ordinary innovations, in rythm and measure, of which so much is heard both in the way of ap- plause and condemnation. The primal emotions of humanity have been so fully sung in England during the last two hundred years, that a poet of the present period, unless he is swept away b}- the torrent of feeling, or is bold enough — SCOTTISH BALLADS. 17 which he is perfectly justified in being — to look upon every situation of life, whether expressed before or not, as merely poetic material, and to use it for his own purposes, colour it by his own mind, shape it by his own emotion, — is tempted, when he remembers in a former writer some consummate expression of an idea, indispens- able to the sequence and stream of emotion, to diverge from the direct path, and attest his originality by becoming unintelligible or un- natural. It is required of every builder that he should erect a house new and well-proportioned ; it is not required that he should, with his own hands, have baked every brick employed in the edifice. The existing system of criticism, and the greatness and fulness of literature, are in many respects injurious to poetical writers. An author's first book is generally written con amore and for himself; critic and reader are forgot- ten in the heat and delight of the task ; but after he has run the gantlet of dailies, weeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies, he becomes more conscious and less single-hearted. He writes with one eye to his subject, and the other to what the reviewers will say of him. He is more careful of the expression than of the thought. B iS SCOTTISH BALLADS. He desires to dazzle and astonish. He is no longer an inspired singer uttering words of fire ; he is a lapidary coldly polishing a gem. The condition of the modern author resembles that of the flying-fish : if it seeks the air to escape its water foes, pounce come the gulls upon it. If he writes quietly, he is commonplace ; if strikingly, he is a- sky-rocket with a noisy rush to heaven, a brilliant burst and shower of falling splendours, and then utter darkness and oblivion. He must either be crazy or dull. Under which king, Bezonian .'' speak or die ! Most men pre- fer the former. The ballad-writers, living under different circumstances, were of course untouched by these peculiar temptations, nor had they to face the spectres and questions which centuries of life and speculation have since started. They had simpler hearts and lived in simpler times. They sang to rude and uncultured men ; their task was to touch their spirits and evoke their sympathies; and from their peculiar environment and training, they exhibit an artlessness and simplicity which become at times the very perfection of style, and which — whatever other merits modern singers may possess — cannot be expected to appear in anything like the same SCOTTISH BALLADS. 19 degree in an artificial and fastidious age. In pathos they are supreme. Nothing can be placed beside them. The feeling is so direct and simple, and goes so to the heart. There is an element of helplessness in it which is overpowering. It is piteous as the complaint of a little child. Sir Philip Sidney said long ago that the ballad of Chevy-Chase, although "sung but by some blinde crowder," stirred his blood " more than a trumpet." The publication of Bishop Percy's " Reliques," at the close of the last century, was the salvation of English poetry. The world Avas weary of the museums of Darwin and Hayley, with their wax figures arrayed in dresses stiff with embroidery and gold ; — pretty enough to look on as curiosities in their gorgeous apparel, but with never a flash in their glassy eyes, never a throb beneath their costly clothes. In the " Reliques " had returned tenderness, and nature, and passion. The voices of men and women were again heard in gladness and grief, the globed dews were lying thick on the purple moors, the wind was blowing strong and fresh, curling the faces of the streams, and bringing odours from the forests. The rivers of poetry had been frozen up, but the spring had come SCOTTISH BALLADS. and loosened their icy chains, and they flowed forth again exulting and abounding. Coleridge has praised the " grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens." Being familiar to most readers, it need not now be quoted at length. Passing, however, such graphic touches of de- scription as — I saw the new moon late yestreen, Wi' the auld moon in her arm : or- He hadna sailed a league, a league, A league, but barely tliree ; When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud, And gurly grew the sea, attention may be drawn to its magnificent close — O lang, lang may the ladyes sit Wi' their fans into their hand ; Before they see Sir Patrick Spens, Come sailing to the strand. And lang, lang may the maidens sit Wi' their gowd kames in their hair ; A' waiting for their ain dear loves, For them they'll see nae mair. O forty miles off Aberdour, 'Tis fifty fathom deep ; And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens, Wi' the Scots lords at his feet. SCOTTISH BALLADS. 21 Whoever he was, the nameless and forgotten author of this old song was a poet, and a great one too. The ballad of Fair Helen is well known, and the story is simple. Helen, a lady of great beauty, had two lovers, one of whom was pre- ferred ; but their passion being displeasing to her family, they were obliged to meet in secret. During one of these interviews the discarded suitor appeared on the opposite bank of the stream, and in a fit of jealous rage, levelled his carabine at his rival. Helen sprang before her lover to shield him, and received the bullet. The following song is supposed to be sung by the bereaved man over her grave : — I wish I were where Helen lies, Night and day on me she cries ; O that I were where Helen lies, On fair Kirkconnell Lee ! Curst be the heart that thought the thought, And curst the hand that fired the shot, When in my arms burd Helen dropt, And died to succour me ! O think na ye my heart was sair When my love dropt doon and spak nae mair ! Then did she swoon wi' meikle care On fair Kirkconnell Lee. SCOTTISH BALLADS. As I went doun the water side, None but my foe to be my guide, None but my foe to be my guide, On fair Kirkconnell Lee : I lighted doun my sword to draw, I hackit him in pieces sma", I hackit him in pieces sma', For her sake that died for me. I wish my grave were growing green, A winding-sheet drawn ower my een. And I in Helen's arms lying On fair Kirkconnell Lee. The reader will note the curiously intermingled ferocity and pathos of these verses ; the lament with which they open ; the grim satisfaction with which he recounts his progress down the river, his foe being his "guide," repeated as if t/iat gave an additional zest and flavour to his revenge ; the terrible reduplication, — I hackit him in pieces sma', I hackit him in pieces sma' — in which he lingers over, and is loath to leave the savage sweetness of the memory, killing the wretch again and again in imagination. That done, he is weak as tears. How desolate and hopeless is the music, — SCOTTISH BALLADS. 23 I wish my grave were growing green, A winding-sheet drawn ower my een. His vengeance is sated The fiery thirst which kept him alive, and all too eager for sleep, is abundantly slaked. There is nothing now to live for on earth. Blind him, therefore, with a winding-sheet, shut out the world from him with its peaceful folds, and lay him side by side with Helen in the grave. A dreadful scene is described in the ballad entitled " Edom o' Gordon." This marauder clatters up to the house of Rodes with a band of ruffians at his heels, and in the absence of the lord demands that the lady should deliver up to him the keys of the castle. She refuses, and the freebooter orders the house to be burned. The poor mother is standing at one of the win- dows with her children, girt with climbing and quivering fires, and rolled in volumes of choking smoke, and reproaches one of her servants whom she discovers busy among the yelling fiends outside. *' Wae worth, wae worth ye, Jock, my man, I paid ye weel your fee ; Why pu' ye out the ground-wa stane Lets in the reek to me ? !4 SCOTTISH BALLADS. " And ein wae worth ye, Jock, my man, I paid ye weel your hire ; Why pu' ye out the ground-wa stane To me lets in the fire ?" " Ye paid me weel my hire, lady, Ye paid me weel my fee, But now I'm Edom o' Gordon's man. Maun either do or dee." O then bespaik her little son, Sate on the nurse's knee : Says, " Mither dear, gi' ower this house For the reek it smithers me." "I wad gie a' my gowd, my child, Sae wad I a' my fee, For ane blast o' the western wind To blavv the reek from thee." O then bespaik lier dochter dear. She was baith jimp and sma', " O, row me in a pair o' sheets, And tow me ower the wa'." They row'd her in a pair o' sheets. They tow'd her ower the wa' ; But on the point o' Gordon's spear She got a deadly fa'. O bonnie bonnie was her mouth, And cherrj' were her cheeks ; And clear clear was her yellow hair. From which the red bluid dreeps. Then wi' his spear he turned her ower, gin her face was wan ! He said, " Ye are the first that eir 1 wished alive again." SCOTTISH BALLADS. 25 He turned her ower and ower again, O gin her skin was white ! ' ' I might hae spared that bonnie face To hae been some man's dehght. " Busk and l)oun, my merry men a', For ill dooms I do guess ; I canna luik on that bonnie face As it lies on the grass." The writer of " Edom o' Gordon " had no theories of art. He uttered only what he saw and felt ; but what words could add to that picture of the burning tower, the unutterable sigh of the mother for " ane blast o' the western wind," and the mute reproach of the face on the grass, more terrible to the marauder than the gleam of hostile spears .'' There is an expression of misery in these Ballads which appears frequently in Scottish song, and is in some degree peculiar to the com- positions of the nation. It is a ghost which rises out of the ashes of passion ; the despair — caused by stroke of death or heartlessness of man — of that love which knew neither pride of birth, nor riches, nor shame, nor death ; which was conscious only of itself, blind to everything save its own rapture and its own joy ; a mental state, not grief, not pain, but rather a dull stupor 26 SCOTTISH BALLADS. of miser}', which would welcome sharp pain itself as a relief from its own bewilderment, which turns passionately to death, and hugs oblivion like a lover. The heart has crowded all on one throw of the dice : that lost, the for- getfulness of the grave, and a quiet coverlet of waving grass, are all that even Hope desires. In 1529 James V. made an expedition to the Borders, and executed many of the freebooters. One of those who suffered was Cockburn of Henderland. He was hanged by command of the king over the gateway of Iiis own tower. The following verses seem to have been com- posed by his wife : — lie slew my knight to me sae dear, He slew my knight and poin'd his gear : My servants all for life did flee, And left me in cxtremitie. I sewed his sheet, making my mane : I watched the corpse myself alane ; I watched his body night and day, No living creature came that way. I took his body on my back, And whiles I gaed and whiles I sat ; I digg'd a grave and laid him in, And happed* him with the sod so green. * Can the English reader catch the strange tenderness and pathos of the word happed? It is one of the dearest to a SCOTTISH BALLADS. 27 But think na ye my heart was sair, When I laid the moul' on his yellow hair ; O think na ye my heart was wae, When I turned about away to gae. Does the reader remember anything half so touching as that woman's lonely vigil by the dead, in a solitude where no creature came, or her progress to some secret place, carrying the body of her lord, sitting down weary with the burden, and then up and struggling on again ? There is in the verses no tumult, no complaint, no wild wringing of sorrowful hands, no frenzied appeal to the pitiless Heaven that saw the deed and made no sign. A broken heart indulges in neither trope nor metaphor ; the language is simple as a child's, the circumstances are related without any passion or excitement. All lesser feelings are lost and swallowed up in utter desolation and woe. Scottish ear, recalling infancy and the thousand instances of the love of a mother's heart, and the unwearied care of a mother's hand. The red-breast /tapped the dead bodies of the Babes in the Wood with leaves. Happed is the nurseiy word in Scot- land, expressing the care with which the bed-clothes are laid upon the little forms, and carefully tucked in about the round sleeping cheeks. What an expression it gives in the verses quoted above to the burden and agony of fondness, all wasted and lavished on unheeding clay ! SCOTTISH BALLADS. There is an old song, published by Dr Percy in his " Reliques," which illustrates the hope- less pathos to which allusion has been made. The circumstances of the tragedy are unknown. All that has come down to us is the following strain of mournful music : — waly waly up the bank, And waly waly down the brae, And waly waly yon bum side, Where I and my love were wont to gae. 1 lent my back unto an aik, I thought it was a trusty tree, But first it bowed and syne it brak, Sae my tnae love did lichtly me. O waly waly gin love be bonny A little time while it is new ; But when it's auld it waxeth cauld, And fades away like morning dew. O wherefore should I busk my head ? Or wherefore should I kame my hair? For my true love has me forsook. And says he '11 never loe me mair. Now Arthur Seat shall be my bed, The sheets shall ne'er be fyled by me ; Saint Anton's well shall be my drink. Since my true love has forsaken me. Marti'mas wind, when wilt thou blaw. And shake the green leaves afT the tree ? O gentle death, when wilt thou cum ? For of my life I am wearie. SCOTTISH BALLADS. 29 'Tis not the frost that freezes fell, Nor blawing snavv's inclemencie : 'Tis not sic cauld tiiat makes my cry, But my love's heart grown cauld to me. Whan we came in by Glasgowe town, We were a comely sight to see ; My love vi^as cled in black velvet, And I mysell in cramasie. But had I wist before I kist, That love had been sae ill to win, I had lockt my heart in a case o' gowd, And pinned it with a siller pin. And oh ! if my young babe were born, And set upon the nurse's knee, And I mysell were dead and gane, For a maid again I'se never be. Burns, in one of his letters, quotes the follow- ing stanzas from an old ballad he had picked up among the country people. It breathes the same hopeless misery as those already quoted, and pines like them for the rest of the grave : — O that my father had ne'er on me smiled ! O that my mother had ne'er to me sung ! O that my cradle had never been rocked, But that I had died when I was young ! O that the grave it were my bed ! My blankets were my w'inding-sheet ! 30 SCOTTISH BALLADS. The clocks and the worms my bed-fellows a', And, O, sae sound as I should sleep ! "What a sigh was there!" Bums adds; "I do not remember, in all my reading, to have met with anything more truly the language of misery than the exclamation in the last line. Misery is like love ; to speak its language truly the author must have felt it." The Ballads relating to sprites, fairies, and other supernatural creatures, are not many in number, but are mostly of great poetic beauty. From these compositions we gain considerable information regarding the spiritual agents in which the mounted robber of the marches be- lieved, and at the mention of whose name, or on approach to the district in which they were supposed to reside, he piously crossed himself, and murmured a prayer to Mary Mother. Per- haps, owing to the desolate aspect of the scenery and the sterner character of the people, the superstitions of Scotland are of a more terrific nature than those of the sister kingdom. The Scotch have no Puck or Robin Goodfellow. The taciturn Brownie who sets the house to right.s, who threshes as much corn in a single night as six husbandmen could accomplish in a SCOTTISH BALLADS. 31 summer day, and forsakes the family when he is insulted by any offer of gift or reward, is the most kindly disposed to human beings. The greater proportion, however, of the creatures of popular superstition are of an uncanny and vindictive dis- position. There is the restless Will-o'-thc-Wisp, who betrays the traveller into the treacher- ous bog and deep morass ; the Water-Kelpie, who haunts at midnight the fords of swollen streams, and raises shrieks of eldritch laughter, when horse and man are swept away by the current ; and there are the Fairies, whose mossy rings are still to be seen on the hill-side ; and when the peasant is overtaken on the lonely moor by these phantom riders in chase of a phantom stag, although he sees nothing, a sound of horns and dogs sweeps past him on the wind ; and on Hallowmas Eve, when they ride forth in courtly and measured procession, dim shapes are visible in the moonbeam, and he hears the trampling of innumerable tiny hoofs and the music of their bridle bells. The Fairies are a kidnapping people, and have acquired great dexterity in their art. They carry off young children, and leave a peevish and misshapen elf in its place ; and persons of maturer age, if they 32 SCOTTISH BALLADS. happen to sleep within the rings after sunset, arc pretty certain to awake in Fairyland. Many a child who wandered out to gather berries in the wood, and who was sought in the evening with tears and a broken heart, and so the next day and the next, is now a happy page to the Fairy Queen. Many a man who never returned from his distant journey, and for wdiose soul mass has been sung and prayers offered, and whose wife, who thought she never could have forgotten him, sleeps in the bosom of another husband, is at this moment stretched in one of the sweet-smelling valleys, and basking in the everlasting sunshine of that Land of Dream, wondering, perhaps, what his old companions are about on the earth, and if they ever think of him now. Seek not to return, O lost one ! However unpleasant to believe, the world wags just as comfortably as when you were one of its denizens. The chair you sat upon is filled. The heart that loved you once has changed its allegiance, and loves another quite as fondly and devotedly. The guests have sat down ; every seat is occupied ; there is no room for you at the feast. When one of these lost ones wishes to return to earth, he informs some friend, by SCOTTISH BALLADS. 33 dream that he has been carried away by the " good people," and points out the method in which his release can be accomplished. The friend thus commissioned takes his station on Hallowmas Eve on tiic highway along which the Fairies are to pass. Soon the cavalcade is heard approaching. He stands forward and seizes a rider by the mantle, and claims him* by name. After some altercation and fierce struggles, the procession sweeps on with mur- murs of discontent ; a hurried trample of in- numerable hoofs and clash of angry bells, and two human beings are standing on the midnight road. In the ballad of " Young Tamlane," we are told how a lady rescued her lover in this manner from the Fairies, and we are also ad- mitted behind the scenes, and learn zvJiy the " good people " have a penchant for the children of human parents. Elf-land, it seems, like every other land, has its secret history and its own annoyances. It appears, then, that the land of Fairy must pay tribute to Hell once every seven years, that tribute being its fattest inhabitant. The Fairies naturally prefer handing over to the tender mercies of the Fiend one of the human mortals whom they have ensnared, rather than 34 SCOTTISH BALLADS. one of their own race. Young Tamlanc is un- happily inclined to obesity ; in fact, he is the Jack Falstaff of Fairyland ; and as the seven years are well-nigh expired, and the time draws near when llcll must receive its due, his sleek and well-to-do condition throws him into a state of considerable trepidation. He therefore appears to his lady-love, and tells her that he enjoys exceedingly the pleasures of Elf-land ; indeed, he would not think of changing his residence but for the weighty considerations already mentioned, which he describes with con- siderable uaiveM and pathos : — Then I would never tire, Janet, In Elfish land to dwell, But aye, at every seven years. They pay the teind to hell ; And I am sae fat and fair of flesh, I fear 'twill be mysel'. He adds that that evening is Halloween, the evening when the Fairies would ride abroad, and that if she would save him, she must act to-night or never. She asks how she should recognise him among the passing troops of ghostly knights and unearthly cavaliers. He replies : — SCOTTISH BALLADS. 35 The first company that passes by, Say na, and let them gae ; The next company that passes by, Sae na, and do right sae ; The third company that passes by. Then I'll be ane o' thae. First let pass the black, Janet, And syne let pass the brown ; But grip ye to the milk-white steed, And pu' the rider doun. For I ride on the milk-white steed, And aye nearest the toun ; Because I was a christened knight, They gave me that renown. My right hand will be gloved, Janet, My left hand will be bare ; And these the tokens I gie thee, Nae -doubt I will be there. They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, An adder and a snake ; But haud me fast, let me not pass. Gin ye wad buy me maik. They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, An adder and an ask ; They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, A bale that bums fast. They'll turn me in your arms, Janet, A red-hot gad o' airn ; But haud me fast, let me not pass, For I'll do you no harm. 36 SCOTTISH BALLADS. They'll shape me in your arms, Janet, A tod, but, and an eel ; But baud me fast, nor let me gang. As you do love me weel. They'll shape me in your arms, Janet, A dove, but, and a swan. And last they'll shape me in your arms A mother-naked man : Cast your green mantle over me, I'll be myself again. Janet takes her station at the Miles Cross, pulls down the rider on the milk-white steed, and holds her lover fast through all his changing shapes. After her green mantle is thrown over him, the wrathful voice of the Fairy Queen is heard — Up then spake the Queen of Fairies, Out o' a bush o' rye, "She's taen awa' the bonniest knight In a' my companie. "But had I kenned Tamlane," she says, "I lady had borrowed thee — I wad ta'en out thy twa grey een. Put in twa een o' tree. " Had I but kenned Tamlane," she says, " Before ye cam frae hame — I wad ta'en out your heart o' flesh. Put in a heart o' stane. SCOTTISH BALLADS. 37 " Had I but had the wit yestreen That I hae coft the day — I paid my kane seven times to Hell, Ere you'd been won away." ]^ut the most famous earthly inhabitant of Fairy-land was Thomas Learmont of Ercel- doune, better known by his traditionary name of Thomas the Rhymer, poet, prophet, and the beloved of the Queen of Elf-land, who alone of mortal men dared to kiss her lips, and whose grey tower nods over the Leader, still regarded with superstitious awe by the natives of that district. This apparition True Thomas saw as he lay stretched on the Huntly Bank on a summer's day : — Tnie Thomas lay on the Huntlie Bank ; A ferlie he spied wi' his ee : And there he saw a ladye bright, Come riding doun by the Eildon tree. Her shirt was o' the grass green silk, Her mantle o' the velvet fyne : At ilka tett of her horse's mane, Hung fifty siller bells and nine. True Thomas he pulled aff his cap, And louted low down to his knee, " All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven ! For thy peer on earth I never did see." :;8 SCOTTISH BALLADS. " O no, O no, Thomas," she said, " That name does not belong to me ; I am but the Queen of fair Elf-land, That am hither come to \\%\\. thee. " Harp and carp, Thomas," she said, ' ' Harp and carp along wi' me ; And if ye dare to kiss my lips. Sure of your bodie I will be." " Betide me weal, betide me woe. That weird shall never daunton me." Syne he has kissed her rosy lips. All underneath the Eildon tree. From that day for seven years Thomas was seen no more among men. After that period he returned and scattered abroad prophecies of days of dool and woe to Scotland, when the fields should be harvestless, and the hare bring forth her young on the hearthstone of the castle ; of storms raging from sea to sea, of disastrous battle-fields, of the strange overflow of rivers, and the final union of the crowns. When he left Elf-land, he was bound to return at the pleasure of its Queen. One day Thomas was feasting in his own tower, when a messenger burst into the apartment, and told that a doe and fawn of wonderful beauty were pacing, without fear, and silently as a dream, the streets of the little SCOTTISH BALLADS. 39 village, Thomas knew the signal, and imme- diately arose, followed the creatures into the forest, and was never again seen on earth. Had the Queen pined for her favourite ? To what glory was he marshalled ? What weird had he to dree ? His countrymen for centuries believed that he was still alive in Fairy-land, and looked for his return. The district of country which produced the Border Ballads — stretching from the cataract of the Grey Mare's Tail, along the green valley of the Yarrow, onward to where the castle-keep of Norham blackens against the sinking sun, and embracing, amongst other streams, the Tweed and the waters of the Teviot and the Ettrick — is, although somewhat limited in extent, by far the most interesting in Scotland. It is a region for the most part pastoral, with round swelling hills of no great altitude, and valleys through which run waters whose names are familiar to every Scottish ear. The traveller passes in a day's journey over fifty battle-fields, some famous, some forgotten, descrying every few miles as he goes, on the hill-side or up the retreating glen, the grey peel of a border laird, roofless and open to the sky, the walls crowned with 40 SCOTTISH BALLADS. long withered grasses, which sigh in the passing wind, and half a dozen sheep feeding around its base, with bits of straggling brambles sticking in their wool ; or perhaps, as the day draws to a close, the mightier ruin of the castle of some feudal lord looms upon him through the fast fading light. The whole district is full of asso- ciations. Every stream has its tradition, every glen is peopled by legends, every ruin is conse- crated by a story of love or revenge. Genius has thrown an additional charm over the country. As you pace beside the crystal mirror of St Mary's Loch, or visit the farm-house of Altrive, you remember Hogg. The shade of Wordsworth wanders along the silver course of the Yarrow ; and when the swollen Tweed raves as it sweeps, red and broad, round the ruins of Drj^burgh, you think of him who rests there — the magician asleep in the lap of legends old, the sorcerer buried in the heart of the land he has made enchanted. This region, so peaceful now, quietly growing its harvests and fattening its flocks, was in the olden time one great theatre of strife and bloodshed. It was the battle-field of the Percy and the Douglas ; and, to quote the old chronicle — SCOTTISH BALLADS. 41 There was never a time on the March partes, Sen the Douglas and tlie Percy met, But yt was marvell an the redde blude roune not As the rane does in the stret. The Kers, Scotts, Armstrongs, and other Border clans, dwelt on the waters of the Ettrick, the Whitadder, and the Teviot, and preyed on England, Scotland, and on one another, with great impartiality. Though the cloud of English war first burst on the Border, and midnight was reddened by flames from peel and farm-stead- ing, and rendered hideous by the shouts of the plunderers and the lowing of cattle driven off with a tumult and rapidity utterly repugnant to their meditative and decorous mode of life ; — though the Jameses, in moments of unusual vigour, suddenly appeared on the marches with an army, and left dozens of the robbers waver- ing in the wind over the gateways of their own towers, — still Ishmael was untamed; in a week Cumberland was swept, or the flocks of the Lothian farmer driven off by the light of his burning house. Crushed and broken, the spirit of the Borderer was never subdued ; his hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him. " Forgive your enemies " was never 42 SCOTTISH BALLADS. a part of his creed ; and revenge, prompt and terrible, was elevated into a chief place among the virtues. He never forgot an injury ; and although the insult was given in hot youth, and years had elapsed, the avenger was silently upon the track, and in grey hairs blood was exacted for blood, and groan for groan. On one occa- sion, Sir Robert Ker, the Warden of the Scottish j\Iarch, was murdered by three Englishmen, two of whom made their escape. After some time they began to appear in public, and one of them fixed his residence at a considerable distance from the Scottish Border. On this becoming known, two servants of the murdered man's son passed into England during the night, slew him in his own house, and brought the head to their master in Edinburgh, who exposed it on a pole in one of the public streets, and left it there to wither in the sun like a gourd. In the reign of James V., Albany, then Regent of the kingdom, thirsting for an opportunity to gratify his private revenge, invited Lord Home to a solemn council to be held on State affairs at Edinburgh. When the hapless chieftain arrived, he was seized, con- demned on a charge of treason, and executed along with his brother. Before sailing for SCOTTISH BALLADS. 43 France, Albany appointed Sir Antony Darcy, a French knight of great ability, to be Warden of the East March in his absence. This Frenchman was an object of intense hatred to the whole clan whose leader had been slain. On the occasion of a border riot, he encountered Sir David Home, who reproached him with the death of his chief. A scuffle ensued, and Darcy sought refuge in flight. He was pursued for miles ; at last his horse sank up to the haunches in a morass. His enemies coming up, struck ofi" his head, and Sir David Home, shearing off" his long flowing hair, plaited it into a wreath, and wore it as a trophy at his saddle-bow. From a passage in the Memoirs of Beaugue, a French officer who served in Scotland (quoted by Sir Walter Scott in his " Minstrelsy "), we learn the dreadful nature of the animosity which flamed between the English and the marchmen. The Castle of Fairnihirst being besieged by the Bor- derers, and reduced to extremities, the com- mandant crept through the breach made in the wall, and surrendered himself to a French officer. A Borderer immediately stept forward, and at one blow struck the Englishman's head four paces from his trunk. A hundred Scots rushed 44 SCOTTISH BALLADS. forward to wash their hands in his blood. After the Scots had slain all their own prisoners, they bought up those of the French, and their hatred may be imagined, when it is not mentioned that in a single instance they attempted to cheapen the price. Beaugud mentions that he himself sold a prisoner for a small horse to a Scot, who doubtless conceived that he had secured the luxury of killing an Englishman in the manner after his own heart at a decided bargain. There are some anecdotes preserved of Walter Scott of Harden, which give a curious enough peep into the domestic manners of a Border chief Harden married the Flower of Yarrow, who bore him six stalwart sons, and it sometimes hapj^ened, when the giants strode in to dinner with appal- ling appetites, whetted by the chase and the mountain breeze, they found, on uncovering the dishes, a pair of clean spurs in each, placed there by the fair hands of the Flower herself That night an English farmer would mourn over empty stalls. A prompt grim old man w^as the Laird of Harden, — no danger of his armour rusting, or grass growing beneath his horse's hoofs. On one occasion his youngest son was slain in a fray with the Scotts of Gilmanscleugh, SCOTTISH BALLADS. 45 but the old warrior had no tears to shed over his youngest born. The Flower of Yarrow might throw herself on the body of her dead son in clamorous grief That was what women were fit for. He had other work to do. His sons flew to arms, and were eager for revenge. Harden quietly locked them up in their own tower, and put the keys in his pocket, letting their fierce hearts fret themselves out there. He then mounted his horse and rode to Edinburgh, where he proclaimed the crime, and gained from the Crown the gift of his enemies' lands. He rode back as rapidly as he had come, the charter in his hands. Releasing his sons, he cried, with a gleam in his grey eye, " To horse, lads, and let us take possession. The lands of Gilmanscleugh are well worth a dead son!" Educated in the belief that plunder was the whole duty of man, and revenge the most exalted virtue, the Bor- derer when brought to suffer, whether by royal authority or at the hands of an opposing clan, met his fate with an unfaltering heart. It was a misfortune, of course, to be hanged, a thing to be avoided if possible ; but he could not feel that he was a criminal, and for him the gallows had no ignominy. He knew that his execu- 46 SCOTTISH BALLADS. tioners merited the same fate as himself, and his last thought on earth was the comforting one, that in all probability they would meet it one of these days — consolation dashed next moment by the thought that he could not be there to see. Pity that ! So a curse to his foes, to his friends the stern'st goodnight, and now , Yet these boisterous men had their virtues. They were possessed of a rude generosity, and would go through fire and water and dare cap- tivity to save a friend. They were civilised enough to abhor wanton bloodshed ; they were savage enough to hate like death all lying and deceit. When a prisoner was dismissed on parole, he transmitted his ransom, or, failing that, returned into the hands of his captor. They sacredly observed their word, and a bargain sealed by a clash of their iron palms was in- violable as a usurer's bond. Deep down in their grim hearts dwelt tears and woman's tender- ness, fountains which, if they seldom overflowed, never entirely dried up. One of the Armstrongs, before he was executed in Edinburgh for the murder of Sir John Carmichael, sang the follow- ing lament : — SCOTTISH BALLADS. 47 This night is my departing night, For here nae langer must I stay ; There's neither friend nor foe o' mine But wishes me away. What I hae done thro' lack o' wit I never never can recall ; I hope ye're a' my friends as yet, Goodnight, and joy be with you all. And a strain is put into the mouth of Lord Maxwell, on his leaving Scotland for France a banished man, which suggested "Childe Harold's Goodnight;" but the Border lord's lament to " Dumfries, his proper place," and " Carlaverock Fair," surpasses in tenderness and pathos the modern poet singing as he gazed on England like a cloud on the horizon, the sun setting behind him in the splendid sea. In the Border Ballads, this savage state of society, with its strife and turmoil, its rude noble- ness and generosity, is faithfully represented. We open their pages, and find ourselves in a new world. The Scotch moss-troopers have been across the Borders with the dawn, and are now pushing rapidly homeward with flocks of sheep and a hundred head of cattle. The alarm has spread for miles, and Cumberland is mounting in haste with spear and lance. Across barren 48 SCOTTISH BALLADS. waste and up steep ravine a bloodhound is already baying on the robbers' track. Men are posted on every ford on the Liddcl ; and afar on the Souter Moor, Will, stalwart Wat, and long Aicky are sitting, with a sleut-dog on the watch. We have fairly trapped the Scots to- day ; and before night there will be many an empty saddle in their troop. Here is part of the rude song of one of the sufferers in the raid : — Sleep'ry Sim of the Lamb-hill, And snoring Jock of Suport-mill, Ye are baith right het and fou ; But my wae wakens na you. Last night I saw a sorry sight — Nought left me o' four-and-twenty guide ousen and ky, My weel-ridden gelding and a white quey, But a toom byre and a wide, And the twelve nogs on ilka side. Fy lads ! shout a' a' a' a' a' My gear's a' gane. Weel may ye ken Last night I was right scarce o' men ; But Toppet Hob o' the Mains had guestened in my house by chance. I set him to wear the fore-door wi' a spear, while I kept the back-door wi' a lance ; But they hae mn him thro' the thick o' the thie, and broke his knee-pan, SCOTTISH BALLADS. 4g And the mergh o' his shin-bane has run down on his spur- leather whang ; He's lame while he lives and where're he may gang. Fy, lads ! shout a' a' a' a' a' My gear's a' gane. Battle is an everyday occurrence, and wounds and dislocations are matters of course. Tush, man, don't look so white, tic up the ugly thing with a napkin ; it is your turn to-day, it may be mine to-morrow. Death, too, is always walking about on the Borders ; even the little "children have seen him, and know his face. The older troopers when they meet him give him good day, like a common acquaintance, and some of the more familiar stay for a moment to bandy a grim jest or two with him. Ane gat a twist o' the craig, Ane gat a punch o' the wame ; Symy Haw gat lamed of a leg, And syne ran bellowing hame. Hoot, hoot, the auld man's slain outright ! Lay him now wi' his face doun — he's a sorrowful sight. Janet, thou donet, I'll lay my best bonnet, Thou gets a new gudeman afore it be night. A fit place, truly, to jest about a new husband ; the old one lying so still there, face downward, on the trampled grass. D 50 SCOTTISH BALLADS. In the ballad entitled "Jamie Telfer," we have a spirited description of a foray, and the subsequent pursuit and rescue of the prey. The Captain of Bewcastle had carried off Jamie's cattle, and the ruined man starts up, " leaving a greeting wife and bairnies three," and runs ten miles afoot over the new fallen snow to summon aid. He alarms peel after peel, and the awaked inmates hurry on jack, and grasp lance, and push on in hot haste to Branksome Ha', where Buccleuch dwelt in a sort of feudal state. " Wha brings the fray to me .^ " cried the old lord, as the riders clattered up to his gates — *' It's I, Jamie Telfer o' the fair Dodhead, And a harried man I think I be ! There's nought left in the fair Dodhead But a greeting wife and bairnies three." " Alack for wae ! " quoth the guid auld lord, " And ever my heart is %vae for thee ! But fye, gar ciy on Willie, my son, To see that he come to me speedilie. "Gar warn the water braid and wide, Gar warn it sune and hastilie ; They that winna ride for Telfer's kye, Let them never look in the face o' me. " Warn W'at o' Harden and his sons, Wi' them will Borthwick water ride ; SCOTTISH BALLADS. s i Warn Gandilands and Allan-haugh, And Gilmanscleugh and Commonside." The Scotts they rade, the Scotts they ran, Sae starkly and sae steadilie ; And aye tlie ower-word o' tlie tlirang Was — " Rise for Branksome readilie ! " With their number augmented, they ride for- ward, and in a short time come in sight of the Captain of Bewcastle and his men driving the booty straight for England. As was to be ex- pected, httle time is wasted in words : Then tilt they gaed \vi' heart and hand, The blows fell thick as bickering hail ; And mony a horse ran masterless, And mony a comely cheek was pale. But Willie was stricken ower the head, And thro' the knapscap the sword has gane, And Harden grat for very rage, When Willie on the grand lay slain. But he's ta'en aff his gude steel cap, And thrice he's waved it in the air ; The Dinlay snaw was ne'er mair white Nor the lyart locks of Harden's hair. * ' Revenge ! revenge ! " auld Wat gan cry ; " Fye, lads, lay on them cruellie, We'll ne'er see Teviotside again. Or Willie's death revenged shall be." 52 SCOTTISH BALLADS. O many a horse ran masterless, The splintered lances flew on hie ; But or they war to the Kershope ford, The Scotts had gotten the victory. Having now secured Jamie's cattle, the idea suggests itself to one of the party that they might improve the occasion by robbing the Captain's house : There was a wild gallant among us a'. His name was Watty wi' the Wudspurs, Cried — " On for his house in Stanegirthside, If ony man will ride with us ! " When they cam to the Stanegirthside, They dang wi' trees and burst the door. They loosed out a' the Captain's kye, And set them forth our lads before. There was an auld \vyk ayont the fire, A wee bit o' the Captain's kin : " Whae dar loose out the Captain's kye, Or answer to him and his men?" "It's I, Watty Wudspurs, loose the kye, I winna layne my name frae thee ! And I will loose out the Captain's kye In scorn of a' his men and he." When they cam to the fair Dodhead, They were a wellcum sight to see ! For instead of his ain ton milk kye, Jamie Telfer has gotten thirty and three. SCOTTISH BALLADS. 53 And he has paid the rescue shot, Baith wi' goud and white monie ; And at "the burial o' Willie Scott I wat was mony a weeping ec. But "Kinmont Willie" is the finest of all these Ballads ; remarkable for the daring deed it celebrates, and the light and laughing scorn of danger which it exhibits. The moss-trooper encounters peril with as gay a heart as he opens a dance with a rustic beauty at a Border fair. Lord Scroope and Sheriff Salkelde have suc- ceeded in capturing Kinmont Willie, a robber whose exploits were well known on the marches : They band his legs beneath the steed, They tied his hands behind his back ; They guarded him five-some on each side, And they brought him ower the Liddel-rack, They led him thro' the Liddel-rack, And also thro' the Carlisle sands ; They brought him to Carlisle castel. To be at my Lord Scroope's commands. " My hands are tied, but my tongue is free, And whae will dare this deed avow. Or answer by the Border law, Or answer to the bauld Buccleuch ? " " Now hand thy tongue, thou rank riever ! There's never a Scot shall set thee free ; Before ye cross my castle yate, I trow ye shall take farewell o' me." 54 SCOTTISH BALLADS. " Fear ye na that, my lord," quo' Willie ; " By the faith o' my body, Lord Scroope," he said, ' ' I never yet lodged in a hostelrie But I paid my lawing before I gaed." So while Willie lies in the central dungeon under a load of clanking chains, thinking on his sins, and the cheerless hours creep on that bring his death on Haribee, intelligence of the capture reaches Buccleuch in Branksome Hall. How the blood of the Border chieftain boils up — He has ta'en the table wi' his hand, He garr'd the red wine spring on hie ; "Now Christ's curse on my head," he said, " But avenged of Lord Scroope I'll be. " O is my basnet a ^^^dow's curtch, Or my lance a wand o' the willow tree, Or my arm a ladye's lilye hand, Tliat an English lord should lightly me? "And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, Against the truce of Border tide ? And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch Is Keeper here on the Scottish side ? "And have they ta'en him, Kinmont Willie, Withouten either dread or fear ? And forgotten that the bauld Buccleuch Can back a steed and shake a spear?" Kinmont is to be delivered, and the rescuing party is described. Note the characteristic touch SCOTTISH BALLADS. 55 of Border humour at the close. It is quite an exquisite jest to run a man through the body, and the want of appreciation of the joke on the part of the skewered makes it all the more de- lightful : lie has called him forty marchmen bauld, Were kinsmen to the bauld Buccleuch ; With spur on heel, and splent on spauld. And gleuves of green and feathers blue. There were five and five before them a', Wi' hunting-horns and bugles bright ; And five and five came vvi' Buccleuch, Like warden's men arrayed for fight. And five and five, like a mason gang, That carried the ladders lang and hie ; And five and five, like broken men. And so they reached the Woodhouselee. And as we crossed the Bateable land, When to the English side we held, The first o' men that we met wi', Whae sould it be but the fause Sakelde ? " Where be ye gaun, ye hunters keen ?" Quo' fause Sakelde ; " come tell to me ?" *' We go to hunt an English stag Has trespassed on the Scots countrie." " Where be ye gaun, ye marshal men ?" Quo' fause Sakelde; " come tell me true?" " We go to catch a rank riever Has broken faith wi' the bauld Buccleuch." 56 SCOTTISH BALLADS. " Where are ye gaun, ye mason lads ?" Quo' fause Sakelde ; " come tell to me?" ' ' We gang to harry a corbie's nest That wons not far frae Woodhouselee." " Where be ye gaun, ye broken men ?" Quo' fause Sakelde ; " come tell to me?" Now Dickie of Dryhope led that band, And the nevir a word of lear had he. " Why trespass ye on the English side ? Row-footed outlaws, stand !" quo' he. The nevir a word had Dickie to say, Sae he thrust the lance through his fause bodie. Here is the rescue and conclusion : — W^i' coulters and wi' forehammers, W'e garred the bars bang meiTilie, Until we came to the inner prison, Where Willie o' Kinmont he did lie. And when we cam to the inner prison. Where W' illic o' Kinmont he did lie — ' ' O sleep ye, wake ye, Kinmont Willie, Upon the day that thou's to die?" " O I sleep saft, and I wake aft ; It's lang since sleeping was fleyed frae me ! Gie my service back to my wife and bairns, And a' gude fellows that speir for me." Then Red Rowan has hente him up, The starkest man in Teviotdale — "Abide, abide, now, Red Rowan, Till of my Lord Scroope I take farewell. SCOTTISH BALLADS. 57 " Farewell, farewell, my glide Lord Scroope, My gude Lord Scroope, farewell," he cried ; " I'll pay you for my lodging maill, "When first we meet on the Border side." Then shoulder high, with shout and cry, We bore him down the ladder lang ; At eveiy stride Red Rowan made, I wot the Kinmonl's aims played clang ! " O mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie, " I have ridden a horse baith wild and wood. But a rougher beast than Red Rowan, I ween my legs have ne'er bestrode." " And mony a time," quo' Kinmont Willie, " I've pricked a horse out once the furs ; But since the day I backed a steed, I never wore sic cumbrous spurs." We scarce had won the Staneshaw-bank, When a' the Carlisle bells were rung. And a thousand men on horse and foot Cam wi' the keen Lord Scroope along. Buccleuch has turned to Eden Water, Even where it flowed frae bank to brim ; And he has plunged in wi' a' his band, And safely swam them through the stream. He turned him to the other side. And at Lord Scroope his glove flung he — " If ye like na my visit in merry England, In fair Scotland come visit me." 58 SCOTTISH BALLADS. All sore astonished stood Lord Scroope, He stood as still as rock of stane ; He scarcely dared to trew his eyes, When thro' the water they had gane. "He's either himsel' a de^^l frae hell, Or else his mother a witch maun be ; I wadna hae ridden that wan water For a' the gowd in Christentie." So all those fierce spirits have stormed them- selves out, and we learn the stories of their strifes and hatreds, their generosities and re- venges, their burnings and plunderings, from the strains of a few wandering and forgotten minstrels. They were brave men, who did what work they had to do with promptitude and vigour, dandled children proudly enough on their knees, and when it came to that at last, they clashed down in harness, and death and pain got as few groans out of them as out of most. Times are changed now, however. Their sons have the same bold hearts and strong arms, but they are turned to other uses, and worn out in other tasks. The stream which of yore rushed wastefully from fount to sea, is banked and bridged ; it turns the wheels of innumerable mills, carries on its bosom barge and stately ship, sweeps through mighty towns where thousands SCOTTISH BALLADS. 59 live and die beneath an ever-brooding canopy of smoke, and melts at last into peaceful ocean- rest, a labourer, grimed and worn ; but its cradle is still, as of old, on the mountain-top among the sacred splendours of the dawn, its companions the flying sunbeams and the troops of stars, its nurses the dews of heaven and the weeping clouds. There are modern writers who conceive that man is only poetical when he clanks about in mail and swears by St Bridget ; when he in- habits an immense castle turreted and moated, with a background of savage pines, amongst which the winds make a great roaring of winter nights ; spends his forenoons amongst his dogs, or amuses himself with flying his falcon at the blue-legged heron that rises screaming from the weedy pool ; and they are careful to inform the world that the ballad is the most natural form of poetry, and ought to be the model of all future compositions. The wisdom of this seems very questionable. The most profitless work on this planet is the simulation of ancient ballads ; to hold water in a sieve is the merest joke to it. A man may as well try to recall yesterday, or to manufacture tradition or anti- 6o SCOTTISH BALLADS. quity, with the moss of ages on them. It has been attempted by men of the highest genius, but in no case with encouraging success. If ever a man was quahfied for the task, it was Sir Walter Scott. No one hved more in the past than he. He was more famihar with the men of the Middle Ages than with the men who brushed past him in Princes Street ; and yet his efforts in the ballad form — beautiful and spirited poems as they all are — are devoid of the homely garrulousness, the simple-heartedness, the carelessness and unconsciousness which give such a charm to the productions of the old minstrels. There is no modern attempt which could by any chance or possibility be mistaken for an original. You read the date upon it as legibly as upon the letter you received yester- day. However dexterous the workman, he is discovered — a word blabs, the turn of a phrase betrays him. Simplicity, which is seen at a glance to be affected, carelessness elaborately feigned, and modes of thought and expression which have no correspondence with the feelings or the language of living men, are not orna- mental to any form of composition. Why should we go to steel-clad barons and rough- SCOTTISH BALLADS. 6i riding moss-troopers ; is there not sufficient poetry in the hfe which environs us to-day ? It is, of course, the merest truism, that in every age and under every disguise — beating beneath the mail of the Crusader or the vest of the EngHsh gentleman — the same human heart sorrows and rejoices, and that all poetry resides in it, and not in its encasement of Yorkshire broadcloth or Spanish steel ; but it is astonishing how fre- quently a truism which has passed for genera- tions among men like current coin, would startle them if they only took the trouble to examine it. The more generally a thing is supposed to be believed by mankind, the less real faith there is in it. Handle your truism, and it explodes beneath your unsuspecting nose like a bomb- shell. Carlyle utters the merest truisms, and what a strange sound that is ; — there is again a prophet amongst men ! Our ballad poetry is valuable; for certain special merits of genuineness and nature, second only to the Shakespearian drama ; but why it should be chosen as a model, and sedulously imitated, is not altogether evi- dent. Let genius have free range and scope ; it has its own laws which it must obey, and no others ; and, although ever new, its develop- 62 SCOTTISH BALLADS. mcnts are ever beautiful and harmonious. Poetry has a value in right of its truth and beauty ; it has also a value of an historical and illustrative nature ; the first may decrease, and be less regarded from the changing habits and feelings of society ; the second increases neces- sarily as the ages roll. Every bygone period of the world has reflected itself in its contemporary poetry. History storms on with siege and battle and political crisis, but Poetry runs alongside supplementing History, smoothing its austerities, filling up its chasms and interstices with music, catching up the Jife of the streets and the current talk and humours of men, chronicling the emotions, the desires that inflame, the fears and spectres that daunt the heart. The Ballads are full of the turbulent times which environed their authors. When we wish to know some- thing of the fourteenth century, we derive our knowledge, not so much from formal history, as from Chaucer's picture of the pilgrims in the room at the Tabard, or his description of their ride to Canterbury on the following morning. Though so long ago, we can see the flutter of their dresses and hear them laughing yet. The reader of Pope values him, not so much for his SCOTTISH BALLADS. 63 splendid antitheses and his glittering wit, but because in his pages he comes face to face with the century, breathes its very air, walks into its saloons, sits among beruffed and rapiered dandies and beauties with patches on their cheeks, hears all their delicious scandals, and the good things of the wits ; and whether in- tentionally or unintentionally — perhaps all the better and completer that it is done without special purpose or design — the day which is now passing will be preserved for future men in its poetry. And while history shall repeat the names of Alma and Sebastopol, and the story of the silent Emperor across the water, Tenny- son and the Brownings will open the doors of our houses, so that readers may see the faces, hear the voices, and note, if they choose, the very furniture of the rooms, with the spaniel asleep on the rug, of the men who are, living now. AN ESSAY ON AN OLD SUBJECT. HE discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning — first fallen flake of the com- ing snows of age — is a disagreeable thing ; so is the intimation from your old friend and comrade that his eldest daughter is about to be married ; so are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable, because they tell you that you are no longer young — that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which somewhere a grave is hid. Thirty is the age of the gods ; and the first grey hair informs you that you art at least ten or twelve years older than that. Apollo is never middle-aged, but you are. Olympus lies several years behind you ; you have lived for more than half your natural term ; and you know the road ESSA Y ON AN OLD SUBJECT. 65 which lies before you is very different from that which lies behind. You have yourself changed. In the present man of forty-two you can barely recognise the boy of nineteen that once was. Hope sang on the sunny slope of life's hill as you ascended ; she is busily singing the old song in the ears of a new generation, but you have passed out of the reach of her voice. You have tried your strength ; you have learned pre- cisely what you can do ; you have thrown the hammer so often that you know to an inch how far you can throw it — at least you are a great fool if you do not. The world, too, has been looking on, and has made up its mind about you. It has appraised you as an auctioneer appraises an estate or the furniture of a house. " Once you served Prince Florizel and wore three pile," but the brave days of campaign- ing are over. What to you are canzonets and love-songs .'' The mighty passion is vapid and second-hand. Cupid will never more flutter rosily over your head ; at most he will only flutter in an uninspired fashion above the head of your daughter-in-law. You have sailed round the world, seen all its wonders, and come home again, and must adorn your dwell- 66 ESSA Y ON AN OLD SUBJECT. ing, as best you can, with the rare things you have picked up on the way. At hfe's table you have tasted of every dish except the Covered One, and of that you will have your share by and by. The road over which you are fated to march is more than half traversed, and at every onward stage the scenery is certain to become more sombre, and in due time the twilight will fall. To you, on your onward journey, there will be little to astonish, little to delight. The Interpreter's House is behind where you first read the poets ; so is also the House Beautiful with the Three Damsels, where you first learned to love. As you pass onward you are attended by your henchman Memory, who may be either the cheerfullcst or gloomiest of companions. You have come up out of the sweet-smelling valley flowers ; you are now on the broken granite, seamed and wrinkled with dried up water-courses ; and before you, striking you full in the face, is the broad disc of the solitary setting sun. One does not like to be an old fogy, and still less perhaps does one like to own to being one. You may remember when you were the youngest person in every company into which you en- ESSAY ON AN OLD S UBJE CT. 67 tercd, and how it pleased you to think how precociously clever you were, and how opulent in Time. You were introduced to the great Mr Blank — at least twenty years older than yourself — and could not help thinking how much greater you would be than Mr Blank by the time you reached his age. But pleasant as it is to be the youngest member of every com- pany, that pleasure does not last for ever. As years pass on you do not quite develop into the genius you expected ; and the new generation makes its appearance and pushes you from your stool. You make the disagreeable discovery that there is a younger man of promise in the world than even you ; then the one younger man becomes a dozen younger men ; then younger men come flowing in like waves ; and before you know where you are, by this im- pertinent younger generation — fellows who were barely breeched when you won your first fame — you are shouldered into Old Fogydom, and your staid ways are laughed at, perhaps, by the irreverent scoundrels into the bargain. There is nothing more wonderful in youth than this wealth in Time. It is only a Rothschild who can indulge in the amusement of tossing a sove- 68 ESSA V ON A A' OLD SUBJECT. reign to a beggar. It is only a young man who can dream and build castles in the air. What are twenty years to a young fellow of twenty .-' An ample air-built stage for his pomps and triumphal processions. What are twenty years to a middle-aged man of forty-five ? The fall- ing of the curtain, the covering up of the empty boxes, the screwing out of the gas, and the counting of the money taken at the doors, with the notion, perhaps, that the performance was rather a poor thing. It is with a feeling curi- ously compounded of pity and envy that one listens to young men talking of what they are going to do. They will light their torches at the sun ! They will regenerate the world ! They will abolish war, and hand in the Millennium! What pictures they will paint ! What poems they will write ! One knows while one listens how it will all end. But it is Nature's way ; she is always sending on her young generations full of hope. The Atlantic roller bursts in harmless foam among the .shingle and driftwood at your feet, but the next, nothing daunted by the fate of its predecessor, comes on with threatening crest, as if to carry everything before it. And so it will be for ever and ever. The world could USSA Y ON AN OLD S UBJECT. 69 not get on else. My experience is of use only to myself. I cannot bequeath it to my son as I can my casli. Every human being must start untrammelled and work out the problem for himself For a couple of thousand years now the preacher has been crying out Vanitas vani- tatiiin, but no young man takes him at his word. The blooming apple must grate in the young man's teeth before he owns that it is dust and ashes. Young people will take nothing on hear- say. I remember, when a lad, of Todd's Student's Matiual falling into my hands. I perused therein a solemn warning against novel reading. Nor did the reverend compiler speak without autho- rity. He stated that he had read the works of Fielding, Smollett, Sir Walter Scott, American Cooper, James, and the rest, and he laid his hand on his heart and assured his young friends that in each of these works, even the best of them, were subtle snares and gilded baits for the soul. These books they were adjured to avoid, as they would a pestilence or a raging fire. It was this alarming passage in the trans- atlantic Divine's treatise that first made a novel reader of me. I was not content to accept his experience : I must see for myself. Every one 70 ESSAY ON AN OLD S UBJE CT. must begin at the beginning; and it is just as well. If a new generation were starting with the wisdom of its elders, what would be the consequence ? Would there be any love-making twenty years after ? Would there be any fine extravagance ? Would there be any lending of money ? Would there be any noble friend- ships such as that of Damon and Pythias, or of David and Jonathan, or even of our own Beaumont and Fletcher, who had purse, wardrobe, and genius in common ? It is ex- tremely doubtful. Vanitas vanitatinn is a bad doctrine to begin life with. For the plant Experience to be of any worth, a man must grow it for himself. The man of forty-five or thereby is compelled to own, if he sits down to think about it, that existence is very different from what it was twenty years previously. His life is more than half spent, to begin with. He is like one who has spent seven hundred and fifty pounds of his original patrimony of a thousand. Then from his life there has departed that "wild freshness of morning" which Tom Moore sang about. In his onward journey he is not likely to encounter anything absolutely new. He has already con- ESSAY ON AN OLD SUBJECT. 71 jugated every tense of the verb To Be. He has been in love twice or thrice. He has been married — only once, let us trust. In all pro- bability he is the father of a fine family of chil- dren. He has been ill, and he has recovered ; he has experienced triumph and failure ; he has known what it is to have money in his purse, and what it is to want money in his purse. Sometimes he has been a debtor, sometimes he has been a creditor. He has stood by the brink of half a dozen graves, and heard the clod falling on the coffin-lid. All this he has experienced ; the only new thing before him is death, and even to that he has at various times approxi- mated. Life has lost most of its unexpected- ness, its zest, its novelty, and has become like a worn shoe or a thread-bare doublet. To him there is no new thing under the sun. But then this growing old is a gradual process ; and zest, sparkle, and novelty are not essential to happi- ness. The man who has reached five-and-forty has learned what a pleasure there is in custom- ariness and use and wont — in having everything around him familiar, tried, confidential. Life may have become humdrum, but his tastes have become humdrum too. Novelty annoys him. / - £SSA y ox AX OLD SUBJECT. the intrusion of an unfamiliar object puts him out A pair of newly embroidered slippers would be much more ornamental than the well- worn articles which lie warming for him before the library- fire ; but then he cannot get his feet into them so easily. He is contented with his old friends — a new friend would break the charm of the old familiar faces. He loves the hedgerows, and the fields, and the brook, and the bridg^e which he sees ever\- dav, and he would not exchange them for Alps and glaciers. By tlie time a man has reached forty-five he lies as comfortably in his habits as the silk-worm in its cocoon. On tlie whole, I take it that middle age is a happier period than youth. In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew tlie road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening — no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air. The lyrical uj>- burst of the lark at such a time would be incon- gruous. The only sounds suitable to the season are the rust)- caw of the homeward-sliding rook — tlie creaking of the wain returning emptj* ESS A V ON AN OLD S UBJECT. 73 from the farm-yard. There is an " unrest, which men miscall delight," and of that "unrest" youth is, for the most part, composed. From this middle age is free. The setting suns of youth are crimson and gold ; the setting suns of middle age Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. Youth is the slave of beautiful faces, and fine eyes, and silver-sweet voices — they distract, madden, alarm. To middle age women are but the gracefullest statues, the loveliest poems. They delight but hurt not ; they awake no passion, they heighten no pulse. And the im- aginative man of middle age possesses after a fashion all the passionate turbulence, all the keen delights, of his earlier days. They are not dead — they are dwelling in the antechamber of Memory, awaiting his call ; and when they are called they wear an ethereal something which is not their own. The Muses are the daughters of Memory : youth is the time to love, but middle age the period at which the best love-poetry is written. And middle age too — the early period of it, when a man is master of his instruments, and knows what he can do — is the best season 74 ESS A V OXA.y OLD SUBJECT. of intellectual activity. The playful capering flames of a newly kindled fire is a pretty sight, but not nearly so effective — any housewife will tell you — as when the flames are gone, and the whole mass of fuel has become caked into a sober redness that emits a steady glow. There is nothinsf crood in this world which time does not improve. A silver wedding is better than the voice of the Epithalamium ; and the most beautiful face that ever was, is made yet more beautiful when there is laid upon it the rever- ence of silver hairs. There is a certain even-handed justice in Time ; and for what he takes away he gives us something in return. He robs us of elasticity of limb and spirit, and in its place he brings tran- quillity and repose — the mild autumnal weather of the soul. He takes away Hope, but he gives us Memory. And the settled, unfluctuating atmosphere of middle age is no bad exchange for the stormful emotions, the passionate crises and suspenses of the earlier day. The constitu- tional melancholy of the middle-aged man is a dim background on which the pale flowers of life are brought out in the tenderest relief. Youth is the time for action, middle age for £SSA V ON AN OL D SUBJECT. 75 thought. In youth wc hurriedly crop the herbage ; in middle age, in a sheltered place, we chew the ruminative cud. In youth, red-handed, red-ankled, with songs and shoutings, we gather in the grapes ; in middle age, under our own fig- tree, or in quiet gossip with a friend, we drink the wine free of all turbid lees. Youth is a lyrical poet, middle age a quiet essayist, fond of recounting experiences, and of appending a moral to every incident. In youth the world is strange and unfamiliar, novel and exciting, everything wears the face and garb of a stranger; in middle aee the world is covered over with reminiscence as with a garment : it is made homely with usage, it is made sacred with graves. The middle-aged man can go nowhere without tread- ing the mark of his own footsteps ; and in middle age, too, provided the man has been a good and an ordinarily happy one, along with this mental tranquillity there comes a corre- sponding sweetness of the moral atmosphere. He has seen the good and the evil that are in the world, the ups and the downs, the almost general desire of the men and the women therein to do the right thing if they could but see how ; and he has learned to be uncensorious, humane, 76 £SSA V ON AN OLD S UBJECT. — to attribute the best motives to every action, and to be chary of imputing a sweeping and cruel blame. He has a quiet smile for the vain- glorious boast, a feeling of respect for shabby- genteel virtues, a pity for the thread - bare garments proudly worn, and for the napless hat glazed into more than pristine brilliancy from frequent brushing after rain. He would not be satirical for the world. He has no finger of scorn to point at anything under the sun. He has a hearty " Amen " for ev^ery good wish, and in the worst cases he leans to a verdict of Not Proven. And along with this pleasant bland- ness and charity, a certain grave, serious humour, "a smile on the lip and a tear on the eye," is noticeable frequently in middle-aged persons — a phase of humour peculiar to that period of life, as the chrysanthemum to December. Pity lies at the bottom of it, just as pity lies, unsus- pected, at the bottom of lov^e. Perhaps this special quality of humour — with its sadness of tenderness, its mirth with the heart-ache, its gaiety growing out of deepest seriousness, like a crocus on a child's grave — never approaches more closely to perfection than in some passages of Mr Hawthorne's writings, who was a middle- ESSA V ON AN OLD SUBJECT. 77 aged man from earliest boyhood. And although middle-aged persons have lost the actual pos- session of youth, yet in virtue of this humour they can comprehend it, see all round it, enter imaginatively into every sweet and bitter of it. They wear the key Memory at their girdles, and they can open every door in the chamber of )'outh. And it is also in virtue of this peculiar humour that — Mr Dickens's Little Nell to the contrary — it is only middle-aged persons who can, either as poets or artists, create for us a child. There is no more beautiful thine on earth than an old man's love for his granddaughter ; more beautiful even — from the absence of all suspicion of direct personal bias or interest — than his love for his own daughter ; and it is only the meditative, sad-hearted, middle-aged man who can creep into the heart of a child and interpret it, and show forth the new nature to us in the subtle cross-lights of contrast and sug- gestion. Imaginatively thus, the wrinkles of age become the dimples of infancy. Wordsworth was not a very young man when he held the colloquy with the little maid who insisted, in her childish logic, that she was one of seven. Mr Hawthorne was not a young man when he 78 £SSA V ON AN OLD SUBJECT. painted " Pearl " by the side of the brook in the forest ; and he was middle-aged and more when he drew " Pansie," the most exquisite child that lives in English words. And when speaking of middle age, of its peculiar tranquillity and humour, why not tell of its peculiar beauty as well ? Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be ;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good- looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. Beauty is not the monopoly of blooming young men, and of white and pink maids. There is a slow-growing beauty which only comes to per- fection in old age. Grace belongs to no period of life, and goodness improves the longer it exists. I have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventy than I ever saw on a lip of seventeen. There is the beauty of youth, and there is also the beauty of holiness — a beauty much more seldom met, and more frequently found in the arm-chair by the fire, with grandchildren around ESS A Y ON AN OLD S UBJECT. 79 its knee, than in the ball-room or the promenade. Husband and wife, who have fought the world side by side, who have made common stock of joy and sorrow, and aged together, are not un- frequently found curiously alike in personal appearance, and in pitch and tone of voice — just as twin pebbles on the beach, exposed to the same tidal influences, are each other's alter ego. He has gained a feminine something which brines his manhood into full relief. SJic has gained a masculine something which acts as a foil to her womanhood. Beautiful are they in life, these pale winter roses, and in death they shall not be divided. When Death comes, he will pluck not one, but both. And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under- world. He would only follow. ON DREAMS AND DREAMING. »i,N dealing with the curious phenomenon of Dreaming, the materiahsts and spiritualists are, as usual, in extremes : the one class regarding the phenomenon as mainly the result of indigestion, the other as one of the proofs of the immortality of the soul. In this matter it may be prudent to steer a middle course. One thing is certain, that what- ever be the cause, the substance of a dream, whether it be beautiful or ghastly, depends entirely upon the dreamer. All men dream, just as all men live ; but the dreams of men are as different as are their lives. You require opium and Coleridge combined before you arrive at Kubla Khan : few men have extracted such terrors from a pork chop as Fuseli. Every man has his own fashion of dreaming, just as every man has his own opinions, conceptions, and way of looking at things. While asleep a man does not in the least lose his personality. Dreams DREAMS AND DREAMING. 8i are the most curious asides and soliloquies of the soul. When a man recollects his dream, it is like meeting the ghost of himself Dreams often surprise us into the strangest self-know- ledge. If a man wishes to know his own secret opinion of himself, he had better take cognizance of his dreams. A coward is never brave in his dream, the gross man is never pure, the untruth- ful man lies and knows he is lying. Dreaming is the truest confessional, and often the sharpest penance. In sleep the will is quiescent, and dreaming is like the talking in the ranks when the men are standing at ease, and the eye of the inspecting officer is absent for the nonce ; it is like the chatting of the domestics round the kitchen-fire of the castle after the lord and the lady have retired — incoherent babblement for the most part ; but the men in the ranks say things that the commanding officer might ponder on occasion, and the gossiping servants in the comfortable firelight downstairs, commenting on the events of the day, give their opinions on this thing and the other which has happened, and criticise not unfrcquently the conduct of the master and mistress. You feel your pulse when you wish to arrive at the secret of your bodily 82 DREAMS AND DREAMING. health; pay attention to your dreams if you wish to arrive at the secret of your health, morally and spiritually. All men dream, and the most common ex- perience of the phenomenon is the sort of double existence which it entails. The life of the night is usually very different from the life of the day. And these strange spectres and shapes of slum- ber do not perish ; they live in some obscure ante-room or limbo of memory, and reappear at times in the most singular fashion. Most people hav^e been startled by this reappearance. Some- thing of importance to you has happened quite new, quite unexpected ; you are sitting in a strange railway-station waiting for the train ; you have gone to see a friend in a distant part of the country, and in your solitary evening stroll you come on a pool of water, with three pollard willows, such as you see in old engravings, growing beside it, and above the willows an orange sunset through which a string of rooks are flying ; and all at once this new thing which has happened wears the face of an old experience ; the strange railway-station becomes familiar ; and the pool, the willows, the sunset with the undulating line of rooks, seem to have been wit- DREAMS AND DREAMING. %i nessed not {or the first time. This curious feehng is gone ahiiost as swiftly as it has come ; but you are perplexed with the sense of a double identity, with the emergence as of a former existence. The feeling alluded to is so swift and intangible that often you cannot arrest it ; you cannot pin it down for inspection as you would a butterfly on a card ; but when you ca7i, you find that what has startled you with fami- liarity is simply a vagrant dream — that from the obscure limbo of the memory some occult law of association has called a wandering wraith of sleep, and that for a moment it has flitted be- twixt you and the sunshine of consciousness, dimming it as it flits. One thing is worthy of remark, that in dream- ing, in that reverie of the consciousness, men are usually a good deal cleverer than when they are awake. You may not be much of a Shake- speare in your waking moments, but you attain to something of his faculty when your head is on the pillow. In dreams, whatever latent dramatic power you may possess awakes, and is at work. The dreamer brings far-separated people to- gether, he arranges them in groups, he connects them by the subtlest films of interest ; and the 84 DREAMS AND DREAMING. man who is in the habit of taking cognizance of his dreams soon learns that the phantoms of men and women whom he has once known, and who rev'isit him in slumber, are more life-like images — talking more consistently, and exhibit- ing certain little characteristics and personal traits which had never been to him the subject of conscious thought — than those he is accus- tomed to deal with during his waking hours. And then the strange persons and events one does dream about on occasions, — persons long dead, localities known in childhood, and never seen since ; events which happened to yourself or to others, and which seem to have faded out of remembrance as completely as the breath of yesterday has faded from the face of the mirror. But these things have not so faded. There is a " Lost Office " in the memory, where all the waifs and strays of experience are taken care of Word and act ; the evil deed and the good one ; the fair woman's face which was the starlight of your boyhood ; the large white moon that rose over the harvest-fields in the September in which you were in love ; the thrush that sang out in the garden betwixt light and dark of summer dawn, when the pressure of a hand at parting DREAMS AND DREAMING. 85 the night before kept you awake, — all these things, which you suppose to have perished as utterly as the clothes you wore thirty years ago, have no more perished than you have yourself. Memory deals with these things as a photo- grapher deals with his negatives ; she does not destroy them, she simply places them aside, for future use, mayhap. If you are a dreamer, you will know this. And in dreams the imagina- tion does not always deal with experience ; it frequently goes beyond that, and guesses at matters of which it cannot have any positive knowledge. There is no more common terror in dreams than that of falling over a precipice ; and most dreamers are aware that in so dream- ing they have felt the air cold, as they cut through it, in their swift rush earthwards. This, of course, cannot be matter of experience, as those who have been so precipitated are placed conclusively out of court. But it is curious that the dreamer should so feel ; that the swift imagination should not only vividly realise the descent itself, but an unimportant accessory of the descent — the chilliness of the swiftly- severed air — as well. And then the all-absorb- ing fact of Death exercises an intolerable fas- 86 DREAMS AND DREAMING. cination over many a dreaming brain. A man dreamed once that he, along with sixteen others, had been captured on a field of battle, and that, by a refinement of cruelty, they were to be shot singly. It .so happened that the dreamer was the seventeenth. The sixteenth man knelt, the levelled muskets spat fire, crackled, and he fell forward on his face. The dreamer was then conscious of the most burning feeling of envy of the dead man — he had died, he zvas dead ; he who was but a few yards distant a second ago, was now removed to an immeasurable distance ; he had gained his rest. And when the dreamer's turn came to kneel, and when the muskets of the platoon converged upon him, he found himself marvelling whether, between the time the bullets struck and the loss of sensation, he could interject the thought, " This is death." Of death this man knew nothing ; but even in the dream of sleep his imagination could not help playing curiously with the idea, and attempting to realise it ; and in his wakinfj moments he could not have realised it so thoroughly. Altogether this vividness of the imagination in dreams is some- thing to which nothing exactly corresponds in the waking state. A Scotch schoolboy dreams DREAMS AND DREAMING. 87 that he is being chased by the Foul Fiend, and as he flies along, he hears behind him a hard and a soft sound alternately ; and this does not surprise him, because he knows perfectly that the hard sound is the clang of the cloven hoof on the roadway. In thus unconsciously work- ing- the tradition of the cloven hoof into the body of his impression, the Scotch school- boy has become a John Bunyan for the time being, and is far beyond his normal state of imaginative activity. If you are aroused from sleep by hearing your own name called, you start up in bed with an impression so vivid that you fancy the sound is yet lingering in your ears. I once heard a friend, and one not specially fanciful usually, tell how he had been one night tormented by the strangest vision. He was asleep, and on a curtain of darkness there hung before him a beautiful female face ; and this face, as if keeping time with the ticks of the watch under his pillow, the beat- ing of his pulse, the systole and diastole of his heart, was alternately beautiful — and a skull. There, on the curtain of darkness, the apparition throbbed in regular and dreadful change. And this strange and regularly recurring antithesis of 88 DREAMS AXD DREAMING. beauty and horror, with the spiritual meaning and siirnificance under it — for the lovehest face that ever poet sang, or painter painted, or lover kissed, is but a skull beclothed with flesh : we are all naked under our clothes, we are all skeletons under our flesh — was as much out of my prosaic friend's usual way of thinking as crown, sceptre, and robe of state are out of a day labourer's way of life. He was a good deal astonished at his dream, and I, with my perhaps super-subtle interpretation of it, was a good deal astonished that he should have had such a dream. But the truth seems to be, that when the will is asleep the imagination awakes and plays. The most prosaic creature is a poet when he dreams. Every dreamer is, for the time being, in posses- sion of the lamp of Aladdin — the world is ductile to be shaped as fancy wills. And this vividness of impression in dream — the realisa- tion of strange situations, the recalling of dead persons — is not only singular, as showing the potency of imagination, which, perhaps un- suspectingly, we all possess — but out of the chaos of dreams a man may now and again ex- tract a curious self-knowledge. The dreamer's belief in his dream is usually intense, and I DREAMS AND DREAMING. 89 suppose the man who fancied himself the seven- teenth man to be shot, and who saw the muskets of the silent platoon converging upon him, felt very much as the poor mutineer does, who, seated on his coffin, sees the same thing of a raw morning ; and from his dream he might discover, to some extent, how nature has steeled his nerves, how he might comport himself in deadly crises. In dream, better often than in waking moments, a man finds out, as has been said, the private opinion he entertains of him- self; and in dreams, too, when placed in circum- stances outside of his actual experience, and which, in all probability, will never be evolved in actual experience, he becomes in some sense his own inspecting officer, and reviews his own qualities. Through dreaming, a man is dual — he is actor and spectator : and in dreaming, he is never a hypocrite ; the coward never by any possibility can dream that he is brave, the liar never that he is truthful ; the falsest man awake is sincere when he dreams. Looking into a dream is like looking into the interior of a watch ; you see the processes at work by which results are obtained. A man thus becomes his own eavesdropper, he plays 90 DREAJ/S AXD DREAMING. the spy on himself. Hope and fear, and the other passions, are all active, but then activity is uncontrolled by the will, and in remembering dreams one has the somewhat peculiar feeling of being one's own spiritual anatomist. And as the dreaming brain concerns itself mainly with the ideas which stir the waking one, and as dreams are ruled by no known logic, conform to no recognisable laws of sequence, are stopped in career by no pale or limit, it is not in the least surprising that in remote unscientific periods these wild guesses of the spirit and bodyings forth of its secret wishes and expectations should have been credited with prevision. Even people in the present day, if any superstitious tincture runs in the blood, or if they are endowed with fineness of imaginative perception, find it hard to shake off the old belief. For, come how it may, dreams, in point of fact, often do read the future. We do not know what subtle lines of communication may radiate between spirit and spirit. If, a century ago, a man had sent a message from London to Edinburgh in ten minutes, he would have been looked upon as the blackest of magicians ; now such messages cost only a couple of shillings, and are matters of DREAMS AND DREAMING. 91 daily commerce. That a man in London should speak to a man in Edinburgh was just as astonishing and incredible to all practical minds a century ago, as that spirit should speak with spirit is incredible to the same minds at the present day. But the apparent prevision of dreams falls, of course, to be explained on quite other grounds than that of some supposed spiritual telegraphy. The dreaming brain is continually busying itself with the objects of fear or desire, and that it should occasionally make a lucky guess is not an unlikely circum- stance. Suppose a man is a candidate for some office or post which he covets, the chances are that, while the bestowal of the post is yet in abeyance, he will dream either that he has ob- tained it, or that he has lost it ; and should his dream jump with the ultimate result, he at once concludes it to have been prophetic. Suppose a man has a near relative at an Indian station, that for a couple of mails, contrary to custom, he has received no letter, and that he dreams a ship is bearing on through a sea of moonlight with the dead body of his friend on board (a result, as regards the friend, certainly on the cards, and a dream, as regards himself, not in 92 DREAMS AND DREAMING. the least improbable — on the contrary, most likely and natural, should his interest in his friend be great), and that it proves true that the friend has died — it would be difficult to convince the man that his dream had not something of prophecy in it. If dreams are not fulfilled, they are naturally forgotten ; if fulfilled, they arc just as naturally remembered. That dreams, working continually in the stuff of daily hope and fear, giving palpable shape and image to desire and dread, should sometimes be found to forestall the future fact, is not in the least a matter for wonder. Such coincidences are as certain to occur, by the law of chances, as that a penny, if tossed up a hundred times, will come down heads a certain number of times. What concerns the dreamers more are the hopes and fears, the desires and aversions with which the dreaming fancy works ; looking into these he may gain some information con- cerning himself not easily obtainable otherwise. MR CARLYLE AT EDINBURGH. INCE the amendment of her constitu- tion, seven or eight years ago, the University of Edinburgh has Hstened to some remarkable speeches — or at all events to speeches by some remarkable men. Lord Advocate Inglis's Act gave the University a Lord Chancellor and a Lord Rector ; and whatever duties might devolve on those high officials, that of delivering an address to the members of the University in the largest obtainable hall was one that could not be put by. At the first meeting of the General Council — a body con- sisting almost entirely of University graduates, and created by the Act referred to — Lord Brougham was elected Chancellor ; and in due time the old man, almost bowed down by the weight of his gorgeous robe, appeared before the University, and discoursed on things in general for over a couple of hours. The speech was attractive enough — to those at least who were 94 ^1/^ CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. near his Lordship, and were able to hear it — but the greater attraction lay in the speaker. The speech was heard by few, the speaker was visible to all. And positively, when he stood up before the University, a certain sense of awfulness pos- sessed one, when one thought of his immense age and intellectual vitality. Lord Brougham lives in the printed Histories of England ; and here he was a contemporary. He rocked the cradle of the Edinburgh Rcviroj. More than thirty years ago Byron closed his career at Missolonghi ; but Brougham cut the pages of the new Hours of Idleness, and indited the famous critique — famous not in itself, but in its issues — which stung the author into a poet. He was Canning's arch foe in the House of Commons. He advocated the abolition of the slave trade. He was in his prime when that old shameful affair of Queen Caroline and her husband — what ages seem to have passed over English society since then ! — was in everybody's mouth. Before many of the men who now listened to him were born, he had climbed into a peerage, had filled the highest offices of State — had culminated officially and intellectually — and still there he was, white and bent and shattered, yet with all MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 95 his ancient vivid apprehensiveness and intellec- tual interests, and able to speak for a couple of hours. That his reception should be enthusiastic was, of all this, the most natural consequence. It was remembered that last century he was a scholar of the University ; that he went out of the University into the world's battle, a sheet of maiden silk ; and now, after more than fifty years, and while not only England, but an entire Europe had changed in the interim, he had returned to the University, creased and frayed and torn, but torn in honourable strife, and heavy with the emblazonries of many victories. He was a great speaker in a world which exists to the present generation by hearsay and in the printed page, and to hear him speak now was like witnessing some superannuated "Victory" — in the thickest of the fight at the Baltic and the Nile — firing a salute, the old port-holes flashing fire once more, the old cannon smoke curling around the decks. Of the matter of the speech itself not much need be said — not a single sentence of it probably remains in the memory of any one who heard it — but the sight of the old white Chancellor, who had seen and done so much, could not fail to impress itself 96 MR CARLYLE AT EDINBURGH. indelibly on the memory and imagination. Lord Broueham was the elect of the General Council of the University ; when their turn came round to choose a Lord Rector, Mr Gladstone secured the suffrages of the students ; and before the University the present Chancellor of the Exchequer has delivered two addresses, the first some years ago, when he was installed, and the second at the close of last autumn, when he demitted office. On both of these occasions the interest of the University was great, but it was of a different kind from that formerly manifested. Lord Brougham had the prestige of memory, Mr Gladstone the prestige of expectation. The one had finished his career long ago, the other was in the midst of his. Lord Brougham was the winner of past Derbys, Mr Gladstone was entered for the next, and the popular favourite. Lord Brougham interested the University seniors, Mr Gladstone the University juniors — the one represented the past, the other was the embodi- ment of the present. Critically speaking, Mr Gladstone's addresses, if more polished and graceful than Lord Brougham's, were not, on the whole, of greater mental calibre. They were MR CARLYLE AT EDINB UR GH. c^-j fluent, colourless, rhetorical, cxpatiatory — if one may coin a word to express one's meaning in the rough ; and being devoid of every tincture of individuality, and glancing rapidly over the sur- faces of things, they gave one no idea what manner of man the speaker was, or what quality of mind he possessed. The only thing which Mr Gladstone made sufficiently evident was, that he could speak eloquently on any subject for any given number of hours. The balanced periods, as they fell on the ear, seemed to have a meaning ; the sentiments evoked applause from the younger portions of the auditory, when they were uttered ; but when read in the news- papers next morning, and divorced from the charm of voice, the whole thing seemed incre- dibly flat and unprofitable. The truth is that, before the University, Mr Gladstone did not prove himself so much an orator, or a thinker, as an elocutionist. And his elocution was really something marvellous. His self-possession was complete ; he stood beside the reading-desk in an easy attitude ; his hands were not incum- brances ; the Rectorial robe lent him dignity ; the grave, severe, somewhat melancholy, almost ascetic face, furrowed and lined " like the side of G 98 MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. a hill where the torrent hath been ; " the finely- moulded mouth, with its immense capacity of scornful emphasis — of which perhaps Mr Disraeli is sufficiently aware — were worth study ; and then the voice — silvery as Belial's, — now resonant in the higher passages, now solemn in the hortatory ones — of which passages there was perhaps a superabundance — who shall sing its praises ? Mr Gladstone's voice is the finest to which I have ever listened ; and during his valedic- tory address of nearly three hours, no hoarse- ness jarred the music of his tones, and his closing sentence was as clear and bell-like in its cadence as the first. One might suppose that, as a general rule, to speak for three hours is a more arduous task than to listen for the same space of time ; yet when he sat down, Mr Gladstone seemed much less fatigued than any of his auditors. Mr Gladstone has the reputa- tion of being the most accomplished speaker of his time ; and if in these addresses before the University he did not quite fulfil popular ex- pectation, the reason was perhaps to be dis- covered easily enough. His addresses were care- fully composed beforehand, and if recited as only Mr Gladstone could recite them, they were recita- MR CARL YLE AT EDINB UR GH. 99 tions all the same. On the occasions referred to he was master of the situation just as a preacher is on Sundays. There was no inter- ruption to chafe, no opposition to excite, no heat of debate to energise and spur the intellect to an activity more than normal. Mr Gladstone, speaking to the Metropolitan Scottish University about the old Greek poets, and Mr Gladstone on a grand field night in the Commons, carrying fire and terror into the ranks of the Opposition, are conceivably very different. There is the same difference between rhetoric hot and rhetoric cold, as between red-flowing lava and porous pumice- stone. Mr Gladstone demitted office, and then it behoved the students of the University to cast about for a worthy successor. Two candidates were proposed, Mr Carlyle and Mr Disraeli ; and on the election-day Mr Carlyle was returned by a large and enthusiastic majority. This was all very well ; but a doubt lingered in the minds of many whether Mr Carlyle w^ould accept the office, or, if accepting it, whether he would de- liver an address — said address being the sole apple which the Rectorial tree is capable of bearing. The hare was indeed caught, but it 100 MR CARL VLB A T EDINBURGH. was doubtful somewhat whether the hare would allow itself to be cooked after the approved academical fashion. It was tolerably well known that ]\rr Carlyle had emerged from his long spell of work on Frederick, in a condition of health the reverse of robust ; that he had once or twice before declined similar honours from Scottish Universities — from Glasgow some twelve or four- teen years ago, and from Aberdeen some seven or eight ; and that he was constitutionally opposed to all varieties of popular display, more especially those of the oratorical sort. But all suspense was ended when it was officially announced that Mr Carlyle had accepted the office of Lord Rector, that he would conform to all its requirements, and that the Rectorial address would be deli- vered late in spring. And so, when the days began to lengthen in these northern latitudes, and crocuses to show their yellow and purple heads, people began to talk about the visit of the great Avriter, and to speculate on what manner and fashion of speech the great writer would deliver. Edinburgh has no University Hall — Mr Glad- stone, holding high office therein for six years, and having the command of the purse strings MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. loi of the nation during the entire period, might have done something to remedy that defect' many tliink — and accordingly, when speech-day approached, the largest public room in the city was chartered by the University authorities. This public room — the Music Hall, in George Street — will contain, under severe pressure, from eighteen hundred to nineteen hundred persons; and tickets to that extent were secured by the students and members of the General Council. Curious stories are told of the eagerness on every side manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast, dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a ticket zvas reserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were besieged long be- fore the hour of opening had arrived ; and loiter- ing about there on the outskirts of the crowd, 102 MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth ; for on the sands there, in the early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and down solitarily, and " as if the sands were his own," people say, who remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift- gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy too, as successor to Edward Irving in the Grammar School, came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German and Mathematics ; and the school-room in which these men taught, although incorporated in Pro- vost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed these fifty years — an act of hero-worship for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble friendship — of the David and Jonathan of so many years a-gone — was the best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I w'as to hear. David and Jonathan ! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity ; and David sang his funeral song : " But for him I MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 103 had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brother- hest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find." In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was filled in every part ; and when up the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, of course ; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentle- men had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had. not yet lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfries- shire as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look, nor had it — as we soon learned — touched his Annandale accent. His coun- tenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful — the countenance of a man on whom "the burden 104 ^^^R CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. of the unintelligible world " had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair was yet almost dark ; his moustache and short beard were iron- grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrow- ful ; and seemed as if they had been at times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about ]\Ir Carlyle ; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass ; he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon — a man to set his mark on the world — a man on whom the world could not set its mark. And just as, glancing towards Fife a few minutes before, one could not help thinking of his early connection with Edward Irving, so seeing him sit beside the venerable Principal of the University, one could not help thinking of his earliest connection with literature. Time brings men into the most unexpected relation- ships. When the Principal Avas plain Mr Brewster, editor of the Edinburgh CydopcBdia, little dreaming that he should ever be Knight MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 105 of Hanover, and head of the Northern Metro- politan University, Mr Carlyle — just as little dreaming that he should be the foremost man of letters of his day, and Lord Rector of the same University — was his contributor, writing for said Cyclopcedia biographies of Voltaire, and other notables. And so it came about that, after years of separation and of honourable labour, the old editor and contributor were brought together again — in new relations. The pro- ceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D, on Mr Erskine of Linlathen — an old friend of ]\Ir Carlyle's — on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe — which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to him — advanced to the table, and began to speak in low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play- fellows must have been familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life could not impair, even in the io6 MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. slightest degree, i/taf. The opening sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on : " Your enthusiasm towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching reminiscence and sigh over old graves — Father's and Mother's, Edward Irving's, John Stirling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time — and with its flash of melancholy scorn : " There are now fifty-six years gone, last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen — fifty-six years ago — to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what — with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expecta- tion ; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to." (Hereat certain block- heads, with a sense of humour singular enough, loudly cachinnated !) " There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up, and say- MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 107 ing : ' Well, you are not altogether an unworthy- labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges.'" And thereafter, without aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same w-istful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared w^ith speech, the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of taking care of one's health. " There is no kind of achievement you could make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions ? The French financier said : ' Alas ! why is there no sleep to be sold.'*' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by everybody .'' Appraise it as you please, it was a thing per se. Just as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex ; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East ; so if you io8 MR CARL VLB AT EDINBURGH. desire an address such as Edinburgh hstened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock. Criticism and comment, both provincial and metropolitan, have been busy with the speech, making the best and the worst of it ; but it will long be memorable to those who were present and listened. Beyond all other living men, Mr Carlyle has coloured the thought of his time. He is above all things original. Search where you will, you will not find his duplicate. Just as Wordsworth brought a new eye to nature, Mr Carlyle has brought a new eye into the realms of Biography and History. Helvcllyn and Skiddaw, Grassmere and Fairfield, are seen now by the tourist even, through the glamour of the poet ; and Robespierre and Mirabeau, Cromwell and Frederic, Luther and Knox, stand at pre- sent, and may for a long time stand, in the somewhat lurid torchlight of Mr Carlyle's genius. Whatever the French Revolution may have been, the French Revolution, as Mr Carlyle conceives it, will be the French Revolution of posterity. If he has been mistaken, it is not easy to see MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 109 from what quarter rectification is to come. It will be difficult to take the " sea-green " out of the countenance of the Incorruptible ; to silence Danton's pealing voice or clip his shaggy mane ; to dethrone King Mirabeau. If, with regard to these men, Mr Carlyle has written wrongfully, there is to be found no redress. Robespierre is now, and henceforth in popular conception, a prig ; Mirabeau is now and henceforth a hero. Of these men, and many others, Mr Carlyle has painted portraits, and whether true or false, his portraits are taken as genuine. And this new eye he has brought into ethics as well. A mountain, a daisy, a sparrow's nest, a moorland tarn, were very different objects to Wordsworth from what they were to ordinary spectators ; and the moral qualities of truth, valour, honesty, industry, are quite other things to Mr Carlyle than they arc to the ordinary run of mor- tals — not to speak of preachers and critical writers. The gospel of noble manhood which he so passionately preaches is not in the least a novel one ; the main points of it are to be found in the oldest books which the world possesses, and have been so constantly in the mouths of men that for several centuries past they have 1 10 MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. been regarded as truisms. That " work is wor- ship ; " that the first duty of a man is to find out what he can do best, and when found, " to keep pegging away at it," as old Lincohi phrased it; that on a he nothing can be built ; that this world has been created by Almighty God ; that man has a soul which cannot be satisfied with meats or drinks, or fine palaces and millions of money, or stars and ribands — are not these the mustiest of commonplaces, of the utterance of which our very grandmothers might be ashamed ? It is true they are most common- place — to the commonplace ; that they have formed the staple of droning sermons which have set the congregation asleep ; but just as Wordsworth saw more in a mountain than any other man, so in these ancient saws Mr Carlyle discovered what no other man in his time has. And then, in combination with this piercing insight, he has, above all things, emphasis. He speaks as one having authority — the authority of a man who has seen with his own eyes, who has gone to the bottom of things and knows. For thirty years this gospel he has preached, scornfully sometimes, fiercely sometimes, to the great scandal of decorous persons not unfre- MR CARL YLE A T EDINBURGH. 1 1 1 quently ; but he has always preached it sincerely and effectively. All this Mr Carlyle has done ; and there was not a single individual, perhaps, in his large audience at Edinburgh the other day, who was not indebted to him for something — on whom he had not exerted some spiritual influence more or less. Hardly one, perhaps — and there were many to whom he has been a sort of Moses leading them across the desert to what land of promise may be in store for them ; some to whom he has been a many-counselled, wisely-experienced elder brother ; a few to whom he has been monitor and friend. The gratitude I owe to him is, or should be, equal to that of most. He has been to me only a voice, some- times sad, sometimes wrathful, sometimes scorn- ful ; but when I saw him for the first time with the eye of flesh stand up amongst us the other day, and heard him speak kindly, brotherly, affectionate words — his first appearance of that kind, I suppose, since he discoursed of Heroes and Hero Worship to the London people — I am not ashamed to confess that I felt moved towards him, as I do not think, in any possible combina- tion of circumstances, I could have felt moved towards any other living man. \V INTER. R»^a;0 town and countr}- Winter comes alike. s ^ii but to each he comes in different fashion. ^^^ - To the \-illager, he stretches a bold frosty hand ; to tlie towTisman. a clammy one. To the villager, he comes wrapt in cold clear air ; to the townsman, in yellow fogs, through which the gas-lamps blear at noon. To the villager, he brines snow on the bare trees, frosty spangles on the roadways, exquisite silver chasings and adornments to the i\-ies on the walls, tumults of voices and noises of skating-irons, smouldering oranee sunsets that distain the snows, make brazen the window panes, and fire even the icicles at the cottage eaves. To the to^\-nsman, he brines influenzas, secret slides on unlighted pavements, showers of snowballs from irreverent urchins, damp feet, avalanches from the roofs of houses six storeys high, cab fares wofully be- erudeed. universal slush. Winter is like a Red Indian, noble in his forests and solitudes, de- WINTER. 113 teriorated by cities and civilisation. The signs of his approach are different in the town and in the village. To a certain northern city, whose spires fret my sky-line of a morning, his proximity is made known by the departure of the last tourist and the arrival of the first student ; by brown papers taken from windows in fashionable streets and squares ; by the reassembling of schools and academies ; and by advertisements in the newspapers relative to the opening of the Uni- versity. By these signs, rather than by the cawing of uneasy rooks, or the whirling away of the last red leaf, the inhabitants know that the stern season is at hand ; a salvo of inaugural addresses announces that he is in their midst, and the reappearance of la\\yers in the long- deserted halls of the Parliament House, is re- garded as a prophecy of snow. In that famous northern city, winter is disagreeable, as in other cities. La\\yers, doctors, and professors tumble out of bed, and shave by gas-light. The entire population catches cold, and the clergymen are coughed down on Sundays. The falling snow covers the pavements — except the spaces in front of the bakers' shops, which are wet, and black, and steaming ; in due time it makes dumb the H 114 WINTER. streets, muffling every sound of wheel and hoof; it slips its moorings, and hangs in icicles and avalanches from the roofs of houses, but it does not appear in any perfection ; it has lost all purity, and is dingy as a city sparrow. It is regarded as a nuisance ; shopkeepers scrape it from their doors, deft scavengers build it in mounds along the streets ; in a couple of days thaw sets in, and from roof, and eave, and cornice, from window-sill, gargoyle, and spout, there is a universal sound of weeping, like that which was heard in the old Norse world, when gods and men lamented the death of Balder the Beautiful. On frosty mornings, cab-horses, whose shoes are never sharpened in prepara- tion, although the previous night every star was sparkling like steel, are tumbling on the hilly streets, and the fare gesticulates from the win- dow, and one man holds down the head of the terrified animal, whose breath is like a wreath of incense, and the driver, clothed in a drab great- coat, with a comforter up to his nose, is busy with the girths, and small boys gather round, and attempt to blow some warmth into their benumbed fingers. Up from the sea comes a wicked harr, shedding disastrous twilight; church WINTER. 115 spires are visible half way up and disappear ; the lights in shops are yellow smears on the dark- ness ; at crossings, vehicles burst on you in a moment, and in another moment arc swallowed up ; and on the obscure pavement all ties of relationship and acquaintanceship are dissolved. Men are strangers for the time being ; without a sinking of the heart, debtor brushes clothes with creditor; and with never a thrill Romeo steps off the pavement to let Juliet pass, quite unconscious that his divinity is near. Even on the more favourable days there is little to please one in a wintry city ; over head the smoke hangs heavily and lazily ; for an hour or so a small uninteresting sun is stuck on the murky sky, like a red wafer on a dirty letter, and the setting is accomplished as rapidly as possible, and without any attempt at pomp. The south- west will not even turn out a corporal's guard to present arms to such a visitor. The towns- man does not care for Winter, although he may care for what Winter brings — the long lighted evenings in which he can read or work, the lectures, the dinner-parties, the concerts, the theatres, and, if very young, the sprig of mistletoe stuck under the chandelier of a Christmas night. ii6 WINTER. But in ' this quiet place — distant but a few miles from the city of which I have been speak- ing — Winter is as pleasant as summer in her prime. To this village, Winter sends other avant couriers than the taking down of brown paper from the windows of great houses, or the advertisement of college sessions. The rooks gathering in the coloured woods was one sign ; the ploughing of the wheat-fields was another. The reddening of the beech hedges told me Winter was on his way. The Robin hopping along the shrubbery walks in his search for crumbs — remembering well they were scattered there last year — told me he was at hand. The rime of a morning on the old walls outside told me he was already come. One could feel the im- palpable presence in the crisp air, in the clear blue distance with the Castle and city spires etched upon it, in the stillness broken only by the rustle of a withered leaf, in the bright yet sobered sun- light, in the quickened current of the blood as one walked. Sated whilom with foliage, in my rambles my eye delights in naked branches, and I please myself with noting how many objects become visible at this season which summer had kept secret ; ragged nests high up WINTER. 117 in trees, houses and farm-buildings standing amongst woods, bridges, and fences, and the devious courses of streams. These things are lost and buried in the Icafiness of summer, and are only to be recognised now, as truths are dis- cerned in age which youth never guesses of. When I return, the sunset is burning away behind the stripes of ancient pines that stand on the scarped bank above the stream, making their bronzed trunks yet more red — yet more dark their undecaying verdure. And by the last gleam on the distant hills, I notice that their crests are hoary. Snow, then, has already come, and will be with us anon. Winter in the country, without snow, is like a summer without the rose. Snow is Winter's specialty, its crowning glory, its last exquisite grace. Snow comes naturally in Winter, as foliage comes in summer ; but although one may have been familiar with it during forty seasons, it always takes one with a certain pleased surprise and sense of strangeness. In each Winter the falling of the first snow-flake is an event ; it lays hold of the imagination. A child does not ordinarily take notice of the coming of leaves and flowers, but it will sit at ii8 WINTER. a window for an hour, watching the descent of the dazzHng apparition, w'ith odd thoughts and fancies in the Httle brain. Snow attracts the child as the pkimage of some rare and foreign bird would. The most prosaic of mortals, when he comes down stairs of a morning, and finds a new soft, white world, instead of the hard familiar black one, is conscious of some obscure feeling of pleasure, the springs of which he might find it difficult to explain. I do not care much for snow in town ; but in the country it is ever a marvel : it wipes out all boundary lines and distinctions between fields ; it clothes the skele- tons of trees with a pure wonder ; through the strangely transfigured landscape the streams run black as ink and without a sound ; and over all, the cold blue frosty heaven smiles as if in very pleasure at its work. On such a day, how windless and composed the atmosphere, how bright the fro.sty sunlight, from what a distance comes a shout or the rusty caw of a rook ! " Earth hath not anything to show more fair." And somehow the season seems to infuse a spirit of jollity into everything. As I walk about I fancy the men I meet look ruddier and healthier; that they talk in louder and cheerier WINTER. 119 tones ; that their chests heave with a sincerer laughter. They are more charitable, I know. Winter binds " earth-born companions and fel- low-mortals " together, from man to red-breast ; and interior domestic life takes a new charm from the strange pallor outside. The good crea- ture Fire feels exhilarated, and licks with its pliant tongue, as if pleased and flattered. Sofa and slippers become luxuries. The tea-urn purrs like a fondled cat. In those long warm- lighted evenings, books communicate more of their inmost souls than they do in summer ; and a moment's glance at the village church-roof, sparkling to the frosty moon, adds warmth to fleecy blankets, and a depth to repose. The white flakes are coming at last ! Stretch out your hand — the meteor falls into it lighter than a rose-leaf, and is in a moment a tear. It is as fragile as beautiful. How innocent in appearance the new-fallen snow, the sur- face of which a descending leaf would dimple almost ! and yet there is nothing fiercer, dead- lier, crueller, more treacherous. On wild uplands and moors it covers roads and landmarks, and makes the wanderer travel hopeless miles till he sinks down exhausted ; it steeps his senses in a 120 WINTER. pleasing stupor, till he fancies he sees the light of his far-off dwelling, and hears the voices of his children, who will be orphans before the morn ; it smites him on the mouth and face as he dies, and then covers him up, softly as with kisses, tenderly as with eider-down, like a sleek- white murderer as it is. In alliance with the demon of wind, it will drift and spin along the mountain-sides, and in a couple of hours a hun- dred sheep and their shepherd are smothered in a corry on Ben Nevis. Welded by frost into an avalanche, it slides from its dizzy hold, and falls on an Alpine village, crushing it to powder. A snowflake is weak in itself, but in multitudes it is omnipotent. These terrible crystals have stayed the marches of conquerors and broken the strength of empires. The in- numerous flakes flying forth on the Russian wind are deadlier than bullets ; they bite more bitterly than Cossack lances. In front, behind, on every side, for leagues and leagues they fall in the dim twilight, flinging themselves in front of the weary soldier's foot, clogging the wheels of cannon, making the banner an icy sheet, stilling the drum that beat the charge. O, weary sol- diers of the Empire, eyes that saw the sun of WINTER. 121 Austerlitz, hearts that love Napoleon — to this i^rim battle with Winter, Lodi and Areola were holiday parades ! The Loire will murmur from antique town to town, through pleasant summer lands of France, till it rests in the Spanish sea ; vines stretched from pole to pole will glow in setting suns ; girls will dance at village festivals ; but for you, never more the murmuring river, nor the ripening grape, nor the dancing girl's waist and smile. For you the deadly snow-kisses, the sleep and the dreams that bring death, the dreadful embalming of frosts, potent as the spices that preserve Pharaoh. At home. Winter is a terrible despot ; but Hke the wild Goths which he nurtured, he becomes more civilised as he travels South. Like a tra- velled man of the world, he adapts himself to the countries in which he sojourns. The ice, which is misery at Labrador, is luxury at Naples, In our country we know Winter chiefly in his mild and fanciful moods. In England he is artist and adorner. He brightens the bloom on the cheeks of girls ; he breathes the quaintest forests on our bedroom windows ; he beards cottage eaves with icicles ; he makes the lake a floor on which the skater may disport himself; he fires the south- 122 WINTER. west with sober sunsets ; he gives star and planet a metallic lustre. But with all these pleasant qualities and obliging graces, he wears here, as at home, the old heart. Have you not seen him in our own streets pinch cruelly a poor child scantily clad ? Do we not know how he maltreats the desolate widow and the unem- ployed artisan ? Do we not hear of him in savage mood killing outright poor homeless wretches whom he has discovered asleep on stairs or in deserted cellars .-• Here, as I have said, he is partially civilised, but at home he is a despot ; there he piles the iceberg that sails southward to crush ships ; there he pinches the starved wolf; there he makes the Esquimaux shiver through all his furs. And the Arctic voyagers whom he takes prisoner and locks up in his immeasurable dungeons of snow and ice, they know what a Giant Despair he is ; and friends at home who wait and wait, and to whom no news ever comes, know it too. There is one more good thing about Winter — he brings Christmas. Through the bleak Decem- ber the thought of the coming festival is pleasant — like the reflection of a fire on our faces. We taste the cake before it is baked, and when it is ac- WINTER. 123 tually before us we find that it is none the worse for the fond handhng of imagination. Christmas- day is the plcasantest day in the whole year. On that day we think tenderly of distant friends ; we strive to forgive injuries — to close accounts with ourselves and the world — to begin the new year with a white leaf, and a trust that the chapter of life about to be written will contain more notable entries, a fairer sprinkling of good actions, fewer erasures made in blushes, and fewer ugly blots than some of the earlier ones. And to make Christmas perfect, the ground should be covered and the trees draped with snow ; the bleak .world- outside should make us enjoy all the more keenly the comforts we possess ; and, above all, it should make us remember the poor and the needy ; for a charitable deed is the best close of any chapter of our lives, and the best promise, too, for the record about to be begun. We are accustomed to consider Winter the grave of the year, but it is not so in reality. In the stripped trees, the mute birds, the dis- consolate gardens, the frosty ground, there is only an apparent cessation of Nature's activi- ties. Winter is a pause in music, but during the pause the musicians are privately tuning 124 WINTER. their strings, to prepare for the coming out- burst. When the curtain falls on one piece at the theatre, the people are busy behind the scenes making arrangements for that which is to follow. Winter is such a pause, such a fall of the curtain. Under ground, beneath snow and frost, next spring and summer are secretly getting ready. The roses which young ladies will gather six months hence for hair or bosom, are already in hand. In Nature there is no such thing as paralysis. Each thing flows into the other, as movement into movement in graceful dances ; Nature's colours blend in imperceptible grada- tion ; all her notes are sequacious. I goout to my garden and notice that when the last leaves have fallen off my lilac and currant-bushes, like performers at the side-wings waiting their turn to come on, the new buds are all ready. To-day I beheld great knobs of buds on a horse-chestnut of mine, liquored over with an oily exudation which glittered in the sunlight. In my plants, the life which in June and July was exuberant in blossom and odour, has withdrawn to the root, where it lies perdue, taking counsel with itself regarding the course of action to be adopted next season. The spring of 1S64 is WINTER. 125 even now under-ground, and the first snows will hardly have melted till it will peep out timor- ously in snowdrops ; then, bolder grown, will burst in crocuses, holding up their coloured lamps ; then, by fine gradations, the floral year will reach its noon, the rose ; then, by fine gra- dations, it will die in a sunset of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies ; and so we come again to withered leaves and falling snows. LITERARY WORK. N every literary work there are two elements : there is the thought, or the thing to be said ; there is the expres- sion, or the manner of saying the thing. This latter element, especially when it takes any characteristic shape, we are accustomed to de- nominate style. And in every work of art the style is even of more importance than the thought : it is the artistic part, it is that through which the artist's personality becomes visible. The main body of the poem, or the novel, or the essay, consists necessarily of ideas which the writer did not originate, which he found ready- made to his hand, which have, in one shape or another, been used before ; and his merit consists in the new forms into which he is able to work up the old material. He calls in the worn coin of thought, melts it down in secret crucibles, and re-issues it, bearing a fresh super- scription and a new value. Thought is mine. LITERARY WORK. 127 your's, everybody's ; but the artist lays hold of our thoughts, and works with them, as a sculptor works with his clays. The world does not need new thoughts so much as it needs that old thoughts be re-cast. The artist is not required to create his own materials. If a man makes bricks, he is provided with clay ; if a man paints a portrait, he is allowed sitter, canvas, and pig- ments. To make a fine modern statue, there is a erreat melting down of old bronze. Absolute novelty of idea — in a poem, for instance — is felt by many as a disturbance, because it is devoid of the sweetness of acquaintanceship and association. Absolute novelty, even if it could be procured, the reader does not very much care about : what delights him is the setting of a familiar thought in a new light, the discovery of subtle links and relationships between things with which he is acquainted, but which he was in the habit of considering disconnected and remote. Approach from a new point a mountain with which you are familiar, and it has all the charm of strangeness ; and this delight of strangeness is felt all the more keenly from its unexpected- ness, and from the mixture in it of the present and the past. The pleasure lives in the mingling 128 LITERARY WORK. of the old recognition and the new surprise. I live — I love — I am happy — I am wretched — I was once young — I must die, are extremely simple and commonplace ideas, which no one can claim as exclusive property ; yet out of these has flowed all the poetry the world knows, and all that it ever will know. The " still sad music of humanity" is simple enough, and may be apprehended by any peasant ; all that poets have to do is to execute variations upon it, to unwind its subtle sweetnesses, to pursue and carry out its suggestions ; and the important matter is, with what amount of skill these varia- tions, unwindings, and pursuings have been accomplished. The thought is only a part of the poem or the essay, and the commonest part. What in a work of art is really valuable is the art. The statue that is only worth the weight of its metal is a very poor statue indeed. Take an English classic — " The Castle of Indolence," or " The Vicar of Wakefield," for instance : strip it of music, colour, epigram, wit, analyse the residuum of naked ideas, and you will find nothing very important nor yet very original. The ideas which make up these works have been gathered from far and near, and were as LITERARY WORK. 129 much the property of a hundred contemporary- persons, as they were the property of Goldsmith and Thomson. " Paradise Lost" proves nothing except that Milton was one of the greatest poets the world ever saw. And all this does not in the least detract from the merit of the poet or the novelist. The matter does not so much lie in the idea, as in the use made of the idea. Music sleeps in the strings of the harp, no doubt, but the skilful harper's hand has to come before it can be awakened. The architect is nothing without the services of the quarryman, brick- layer, and plasterer ; the general is nothing unless the recruiting-serjeant be preliminary. Yet we admire the great musician more than the artificer who built the instrument. We do not place Sir Christopher Wren and a hodman on the same level ; the recruiting-serjeant is gathered quietly to his fathers, and forgotten, while Wellington's war-horse snorts in bronze in every one of the British cities, and his fame fills an era in our history, as the sound of the billow Fingal's cave in Stafta. A literary work of art is neither a mathe- matical demonstration, nor a " Pinnock's Guide to Knowledge," nor an argument It is not I30 LITERARY WORK. designed to prove anything, nor yet to dis- seminate information useless or useful. If harshly questioned, it frequently can give no very satisfactory reason for its existence. It is something above and beyond mere use, like the colour and breath of a flower, or the burn- ing breast of a humming-bird. Incidentally, it may subserve purposes tangible enough, but its primary office is to please; at all events, if it fail in that, it fails in everything. If it cannot delight, its existence is an impertinence for which no apo- logy can be accepted, and the world gives it the cold shoulder. And here it is that the su- preme importance of style becomes visible. We see at once the superlative value of concise- ness, neat or cunning turns of sentence, colour, cadence, the glitter of fancy and epigram ; we see at once what room there is for the play of all the weapons of rhetoric, — only in the using of the weapons we must take lessons from Nature, and not from the rhetorician. For the lunge that rids you of your adversary is the inspira- tion of the moment, never the remembered lesson of the fencing-master. In literature, the how a thing is said is of as much import- ance as the thing itself. Thought, if left to LITERARY WORK. 131 itself, will dissolve and die. Style preserves it as balsams preserve Pharaoh. Fine phrases are, after all, the most valuable things. Epi- grams are our most unquestionable antiques. Out of the iUhris of the early world we have raked a few poetical images, and they are as fresh now as on the day on which they were first uttered. The enamel of style is the only thing that can defy the work of time. In virtue of his style. Homer lives, just as Addison and Jeremy Taylor live in virtue of theirs. To define the charm of style is as difficult as to define the charm of beauty or of fine manners. It is not one thing, it is the result of a hundred things. Everything a man has is concerned in it. It is the amalgam and issue of all his faculties, and it bears the same relation to these that light bears to the sun, or the per- fume to the flower. And apart from its value as an embalmer and preserver of thought, it has this other value, that it is a secret window through which we can look in on the writer. A man may work with ideas which he has not originated, which do not in any special way belong to himself; but his style — in which is included his way of approaching a subject, and 132 LITERARY WORK. his method of treating it — is always personal and characteristic. We decipher a man by his style, find out secrets about him, as if we over- heard his soliloquies, and had the run of his diaries, just as in conversation, and in the ordinary business of life, we draw our impres- sions, not so much from what a man says, as from the manner and the tone of voice in which the thing is said. The cunning reader draws conclusions from emphasis, takes note of the half-perceptible sneer, makes humour stand and deliver its secret, and estimates what bitter- ness it has taken to congeal into sharpness the icy spear of wit. After this fashion, in every book the writer's biography may more or less clearly be read. For a man needs not to speak directly about himself to be personally communi- cative. And, in truth, it is in the amount of this kind of personal revelation that the final value of a book resides. We read books, not so much for what they say as for what they suggest. A great writer's characters are not nearly so interesting as the great writer him- self, and we take to them on account of their paternity, as we take to the children of our friends. There are books we read over and LITERARY WORK. 133 over again, and all the while we are striving to catch a glimpse of the author between the lines. The characters of the great writer take us back constantly to the great writer, as the sunbeam constantly takes us back to the sun. And by this relationship to something greater than themselves they are dignified, as an ambassador, in whatever country he may be placed, wears the dignity of the sovereign of whom for the time being he is the representative. If you desire information respecting the sovereign, it is to the ambassador you must apply. Don Quixote is not so great as Cervantes ; Hamlet is not so great as Shakespeare ; Satan is not so great as Milton ; but through the characters we have named we learn more about the writers than we do from their professed biographies. Biography frequently can show us little more than the table a man sat at, the bed he slept on. In mere biographical value and pertinence, Lockhart's " Life of Burns " is not comparable for a moment with the poems of Burns ; and what makes Mr Carlyle's essay on that poet stand almost alone in our literature as a master- piece of full and correct delineation, is the way in which he makes this line or the other a 134 LITERARY WORK. transparent window of insight, through which he obtains the closest gHmpses of his subject. It is only the books which contain this un- conscious personal reference — and this comes out, not so much in what is said, as in the manner of saying it — that are worth much, or that can permanently interest. Take up an essay of Montaigne's; you are startled by no remarkable breadth or weight of idea, but you are constantly encountering sen- tences through which you can look in on the author as through a stereoscopic lens. You take up an essay of Charles Lamb's, and in the quaint setting of his thoughts — like a piquant face in a Quaker bonnet — you are continually renewing and improving your acquaintance with the shiest, most delicate, and, in some respects, the noblest and purest of modern spirits. People never weary of reading Montaigne and Lamb, for while the thoughts they express have sufficient merit as thoughts, they are at the same time biographies in brief. They may have written finely or foolishly, seriously or with levity, but they have always written with a certain personal flavour. Take up, on the other hand, one or other of the novels which have recently acquired LITERARY WORK. 135 a prodigious popularity, and while you find the central secret hidden away in the cunningest manner under fold on fold of incident, you find nothing else in the \east worthy of regard, and a single perusal disposes of all the interest which can arise from the unravelling of the plot These — in their own way extremely clever and excit- ing works — possess no reflection, no landscape, no commentary on what is going on, and they are entirely innocent of the personal revelation of which we have been speaking. The characters themselves are the merest films and shadows, and the books in which we make their acquaint- ance seem written by people who have never been in love, who have never stood by a friend's death-bed, who have never seen the sun rise or set — who have no biography, in short. Rising from them, you have been enabled to form no idea of the writer's personality, you have been introduced to no experience with which you can compare your own. You have only had your curiosity piqued for an unconscionable length of time ; and when, at the close of the third volume, the murder is out, you no more think of reading the book over again, than, reaching London by the night train from the 136 LITERARY WORK. North, you dream of returning for the mere purpose of undergoing your journey a second time. You have found out the secret, as you have come to London. The carriage has been the instrument in the one case, the three volumes in the other, and your purposes with both have been entirely served. It is by their styles that writers are recognised, just as it is by their gait, their bearing, their tones of voice, and their numberless individual peculiarities that you recognise men in the street or in the drawing-room. Every sentence of the great writer is like an autograph. There is no chance of mistaking Milton's large utterance, or Jeremy Taylor's images, or Sir Thomas Browne's quaint- ness, or Charles Lamb's cunning turns of sen- tence. These are as distinct and individual as the features of their faces or their signatures. If Milton had endorsed a bill with half-a-dozen blank verse lines, it would be as good as his name, and would be accepted as good evidence in court. If Lamb had never gathered up his essays into those charming volumes, he could be tracked easily by the critical eye through all the magazines of his time. The identity of these men can never be mistaken. Every printed LITERARY WORK. 137 page of theirs is like a coat of arms, every trivial note on ordinary business like the im- pression of a signet ring. As a whole, our literature, and especially our periodical literature, is not distinguished at this moment by style in any rich and characteristic way. Much of the writing is commonplace, just as a man's countenance is commonplace which has no marked and prominent feature, which has no individuality of expression, and which does not differ in any material degree from the countenances of his fellows. There is a cer- tain weekly Review, which is much read, much admired, and much feared. The writing is extremely clever ; but the odd thing is, that the writing is throughout of equal cleverness, and of the same kind of cleverness. Each number is level, like a grassy lawn, yet each number must be the production of at least twenty able quills. Have these twenty writers identical tempers, identical brains, and identical experiences } Or is the editor a sort of grass roller, which keeps everything smooth and level .^ There is a cer- tain weekly journal, conducted by a master of fiction, which seems to be entirely written by the editor; certain portions when the editor is 138 LITERARY WORK. at his best, other portions when his eyes were weary. " Methinks there be six Richmonds in the field " — one Richmond agile, and an able swordsman ; five, who have received fencing lessons from the master, who put continually in practice his method of carte and tierce, but who lack his stamina and dash. Such writing is comparatively valueless, because it lacks in- dividuality, and does not spring from any peculiar personality. It is clever, of course ; but the cleverness is acquired rather than native. All the defects of our present literature may be summed up in a word — want of style. And the reason is not far to seek. Literature has be- come a profession. Books are written too hastily, and to serve a purpose too immediate. In the days of the old masters of style, the writer adorned his thoughts for the mere love of adorning his thoughts : in the present state of things, it is hardly to be expected that he should put himself to any considerable trouble on that score. The market of the old writer was with posterity ; the market of the present writer is in the next street. The Gothic cathedral, whose front, from base to pinnacle, is a floral burst and laughter of stone, was not LITERARY WORK. 139 built by estimate. The Gothic cathedral could wait a century or so for a congregation. Before our present churches are finished, the congrega- tion are eager to enter and take their seats, to criticise the interior decorations, and to hear what the preacher has got to say. And yet in this world there is no such thing as entire and absolute loss. We cannot write so supremely now as did the old men ; but this we can say for ourselves, that while they served ten, we serve a thousand ; that while they ornamented sandals for nobles, we make boots and shoes for the multitude ; and that it is better for every man to have his beer in the pot, than that in the midst of need there should be spread at intervals a royal feast, with kings for guests, and golden vessels on the table. There are no dishes of peacocks' brains now, but there are wholesome wheaten loaves for all. THE MINISTER-PAINTER. N elancincf backward over the last cen- tury and a-half of Scottish history, it will be noticed that distinguished men have come in clusters, and that the intellectual products of these are visible in well-defined belts or zones. Nature there, as elsewhere, built capacious brains, and when her hand was in, it was her habit to build more than one ; and so the clever Scotchmen of a generation have a family resemblance, and the works produced by them have a family resemblance also. Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith came together ; and through these we have the philosophic and historical belt. Scott and Gait created the imaginative belt ; Jeffrey, Wilson, and Lockhart the critical belt. In any enumeration of eminent Scotchmen the name of Burns cannot be omitted, but then Burns has no place in any such loose generalizations. In his greatness he is the lone- liest of all the northern geniuses. He had, THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 141 strictly speaking, no predecessor, he had no companion, he has had no successor. Critics have delighted to point out that the " Farmer's Ingle" of Fergusson was the prototype of the "Cottar's Saturday Night," but the truth is, that Fercfusson had no more share in the most ex- quisite of homely idylls than the leaves of the mulberry tree on which the silkworm feeds has a share in the silk which is produced. Putting Burns aside, as in some sense a special pheno- menon, who must be considered by himself if considered at all, the three broadly-marked belts or zones of Scottish mental activity are indicated by the "Essays, Moral and Philosophical," and the " Wealth of Nations ;" the novels of Scott and Gait ; and the Edinburgh Review and Black- wood's Magazine. So much one can see looking back on the past ; but it would be extremely difficult to say what, since the establishment of the famous Reviezv, and the still more famous Magazine, is the salient outstanding feature of Scottish intellectual life. And the difficulty lies in this, that, ecclesiastical matters apart, there has, during the last twenty or twenty-five years, been hardly any distinctive Scottish life at all. " Stands Scotland where it did ?" asks Macduff; 142 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. and the answer to-day is, " No ; if you seek Scotland, you must go to London for her." The old frontier line has been effaced by the railway and the post-office. The Tweed no longer divides peoples with different interests. Scot- land and England have melted into each other and become Britain, just as red and blue melt into each other and become purple ; and in the general intellectual activity of the empire, it would be as difficult to separate that contributed by north and south as to separate the waters of the Forth and the Humber in the German Ocean, or the taxes gathered on either side of the Tweed in the Imperial exchequer. John Bull and Patrick serve in the ranks of the Black Watch and the Greys, and Sandy is a sentry at the Horse Guards. An English professor is the most distinguished disciple of the Scottish Sir William Hamilton ; and the representative of a metropolitan constituency — a Scot at least by extraction — is the intellectual descendant of the English Bentham. It is from this interconnec- tion of the two peoples, that for the last quarter of a century there has been so little distinctive Scottish intellectual life. Scotland has over- flowed its boundaries, and it has no longer a 777^ MINISTER-PAINTER. 143 separate existence in thought or geography. It is not, however, to be supposed that, although working under different conditions, there is any diminution in the northern vigour. The Scot thinks as shrewdly and acts as prudently in Cheapside as at Aberdeen or at John o' Groat's ; and when great things have to be done — when, for instance, a treaty has to be negotiated with China, when a revolted India has to be sub- dued, when a " Life of Frederick " has to be written — the doers of those feats of diplomacy, arms, and letters, are not unfrequently found wearing Scottish names. But the difficulty of pointing out any broad, salient, outstanding feature in Scottish intellectual life, does not altogether arise from the cessation of that life in the sense which has been explained, but in some degree from the fact that, since the estab- lishment of Blackwood's Magazine, Scottish in- tellect and fancy have more and more sought a new manifestation and direction. For long-, Scot- land was the best educated and least aesthetic nation in Europe. Beauty and ornament had never specially been the denizens of the Scottish house or the Scottish street; and at the Reforma- tion they were sternly thrust forth and forbidden 144 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. to enter the ecclesiastical edifice. In Scotland, Beauty was churchless, and on Sundays had to abide with the daisy in the field, the cloud- shadow on the hill-side, and to consort with the Poet, who was a commoner of Nature like her- self, and under the same social ban. Not the least religious nation in the world, the Scotch were content to worship in barn-like buildings, with windows hard in outline and innocent of colour as those of factories ; and Music, sus- pected of Popish parentage, and of haunting the play-house and the opera, was turned away from the church-door, and had to go romp in the fields with Beauty and the Poet. Untouched by the softening influences of art, the Scottish nation was devout, deep-hearted, humorous, sincere ; but it was harsh in manner, deficient in gra- ciousness and suavity. The visitor, on coming to Scottish towns, was struck by the lack of politeness on the part of the inhabitants. He saw them, unyielding as tides, jostle each other on the pavement. If he asked to be directed to a particular street, he not unfrequently received a churlish response. He noted that in these towns statues and public monuments were rare, that they were disregarded and often ill kept ; THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 145 and, if a travelled man, he drew disadvantageous comparisons between the Scottish towns and the French or Italian ones. This hardness and lack of graciousness, this lack of art and of regard for art, was attributable to a considerable extent to the national poverty and the national faith. There is no social civiliser like art, but art does not grow in poor countries any more than grapes on poor soils. You may keep a poet on £^0 a year, and get a good deal out of him, just as our fathers for something like that sum got a tre- mendous deal out of Burns ; but you cannot so cheaply maintain painters and sculptors. If you will adorn your apartments with their works, they can at least claim upholsterers' wages. And, putting inspiration out of the question altogether, pigments and marble are much more expensive than pens and ink, and the backs of old letters, or excise schedules at a pinch. On Calvinism you can breed first-rate men, but not so easily first-rate artists. Art delights in minster and cathedral, in painted window and fuming incense, in gorgeous vestments and the voices of singing-men and singing-women, and finds but little sustenance in barn-like churches, discordant psalmody, rigid pews, and K 146 777^ MINISTER-PAINTER. intrepid, closely-knit, logical discourses. Scot- land was a well-educated country, as countries went, but it wanted artistic susceptibility ; and it was only when it became comparatively rich, and when its social atmosphere became a little more genial, that art began to develop itself in any general or unmistakeable manner. The picture and the statue came with wealth into the private apartment; the ornate church, the famous man in bronze or marble, came with wealth into the street ; and the public eye becoming accustomed to these things, gradually learned to enjoy them. The establishment of the Ediiibiirgh Review and Blackwood s Magazine wdiS the last distinct phase of Scottish — that is, of Scottish as distinct from British — intellectual life ; and at that time Scot- tish art was in its vigorous youth, and quite abreast of Scottish literature. Scotchmen, save in isolated instances, and generally out of their own country, have done nothing very remarkable in literature since ; but at home there has grown up a school of art, distinct, vigorous, individual, which has spread far and wide, and which has more than one representative amongst the Forty of the Royal Academy. The pen was long the favourite weapon of the clever Scot, but since THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 147 John Wilson's time the cleverest men in Scot- land have wielded the brush rather than the pen. The school of Scottish art had at first, as was natural, a good deal in common with the more favourite form of Scottish literature — of poetry- more especially. When the northern genius was not piercingly lyrical — tingling to the very marrow in song and ballad — it was for the most part garrulous and manners-painting. Rustic life, with its humours, its fun, its jealousies, its petty passions, its coarsenesses even — when these were reflected in some incident like a marriage, a festival, a fair, or a wapinschaw — has always had special attraction for the Scottish muse. This vein of manners-painting is visible from " Christ's Kirk on the Green," down through the " Gentle Shepherd " of Ramsay, the " Leith Races" of Fergusson, the "Jolly Beggars" and " Hallowe'en " of Burns, to the " Anster Fair" of Tennant ; and in the same way, and for the same reasons, the Scottish school of painting abounds'in admirable representations of rustic life : witness the best pictures of David Allan, the " Penny Wedding," and a dozen others of Sir David Wilkie, the " Curlers " of Mr Harvey, and the works of many others less distinguished. The 148 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. Scottish painters have in an indirect, yet most sufficient manner, illustrated the Scottish poets. In this special department Scottish art will take rank with Dutch — with the advantage that it has more esprit and less of mere vulgar swilling and boorishness. In the domain of highest art — just as there is no northern Spenser or Milton — Scotland is behind England, and has, perhaps, no proper representative, if we except the late Mr David Scott and the present Mr J. Noel Paton. In portraiture and landscape the Scottish school excels. In the department of portraiture the Scotch are distinguished by a solidity of basis and treatment, and a direct going at essentials to the neglect of subsidiaries. Any one look- ing at the men Sir Henry Raeburn, Sir John Watson Gordon, and Mr Macnee have painted, will see that, in the delineation of character- istic heads and faces, of men who are individual and not conventional, the national shrewdness, humour, biographical talent, and insight, have in the most mysterious way become mixed with the colours. I say the men these artists have painted, for somehow they have not succeeded so well with women. If the Scotch style has a specialty, it is that of robustness, of solid force and THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 149 character — elements which are much more mas- cuHnc than feminine. Given a granite-faced Provost of Peterhead, wrinkled all over with shrewd, pawky, tell-tale lines, and there are half-a-dozen Scotchmen who will paint him so to the life, that the spectator will know what kind of a voice he has, whether he has been married twice, and what he usually takes for breakfast. Given an elegant lady, and perhaps Sir Francis Grant is the only Scotchman who can paint her in her self-possession and easy security — high bred to the finger-tips, and per- fectly comme ilfaut in every least matter of de- tail. Sir Henry Raeburn struck the key-note of Scottish portrait painting, and it is vibrating still. In Scottish landscape again — which par- takes of similar characteristics — the key-note was struck by the Rev. John Thomson of Dud- ingstone ; and his influence is still observable, not only in Mr Macculloch's " cold and splendour of the hills," in the Wordsworthian repose of Mr Harvey's pastoral hill-sides, but in Mr Peter Graham's " Mountain River in Flood," amongst the landscapes of the Royal Academy of this year the observed of all observers. Mr Thomson, while he lived, was the most I50 THE MINISTER-PAINTER distinguished landscape painter of the Scottish school ; and he was unique in this, that he was clergyman as well as painter : that it was his work to study the page of Nature and the page of Revelation. It would be interesting to know, if it were at all now possible, how he conducted this double life — if the artistic and clerical ele- ments lived together, reciprocally enriching and assisting each other — the one bringing reverence and sanctity into his studio, the other bringing pictures into his sermons. When discoursing on the Dead Sea, did he behold in imagination the red hills of Moab looming low on the horizon } If prelecting on the passage — as in the course of his ministrations it is likely that he would prelect — And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his yonng inen with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burtit-offering, and rose tip, and went nnto the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day A braJiani lifted np his eyes, and sazu THE PLACE AFAR OFF — one would like to know what mental image he formed of the yet untempled Moriah ; was it a Syrian mount, or the double- peaked Benledi — the Hill of God of his own THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 151 country — with the Scottish morning spread above it ? One would Hke to know, if one could, whether Thomson brought the landscape painter with him into the pulpit. But of his quality as a preacher no information can be obtained. The people who bought his pictures did not care for his sermons ; the people who listened to his sermons did not care for his pictures. His parishioners regarded his landscape paint- ing as they regarded his violin playing — a pretty amusement enough, but one not in the least befitting the dignity of his cloth. Thomson was, no doubt, an excellent preacher, after a quiet, elegant, unenthusiastic, charitable fashion. He was in every way an accomplished man. He had a competent knowledge of literature, and, when working on his landscapes, was in the habit of reciting from the classical and English poets passages that seemed to illustrate the scene he was depicting ; he was an exquisite musician ; he was well read in the natural sciences, and con- tributed several papers on such subjects to the Edinburgh Review. We know how he painted, we can guess how he preached ; and the fact that he was both preacher and painter takes him out of the category of ordinary men. A 152 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. solitary, sad-eyed, mediaeval monk, illuminating missals in a cloistered silence, broken only by the tinkling of refectory or prayer bells, is familiar enough to the imagination ; but a mo- dern Presbyterian clergyman, painting pictures on week days, and preaching sermons on Sun- days ; writing papers on optics for the Edinburgh Review, and drawing tears in the evening in his drawing-room by his violin performances; throw- ing down his brushes of a forenoon, placing against the wall a picture of the Bass, with a thunder-cloud blackening over it ; going out to see an ailing parishioner, noting on his way how a sunbeam made gleam the ivies on Craig- millar which a shower had just wet, and return- ing to receive to dinner Sir Walter Scott, fresh from the " Bride of Lammermoor ;" or Sir David Wilkie, fresh from Spain and the study of Velasquez — this complex activity, this variety of duty, this fulness of noble life, is something not very frequently met with. Young Thomson was born at Dailly in Ayr- shire, of which parish his father was minister, in the latter half of the last century ; and there, amid the beautiful scenery surrounding him, he nourished his taste for landscape. His father THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 153 destined him for the sacred profession ; and, in accordance with a Scottish fashion not yet obsolete, at a very early age he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, to attend literary and philosophical classes, preparatory to entering on the study of divinity. At the lodgings of his elder brother, who had come to Edinburgh some years before, and who, in after life, became dis- tinguished as a feudal lawyer and an anti- quarian, the enthusiastic young man made the acquaintance of Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and others. He stuck to his work during the winter sessions ; but in his summer vacations at home he devoted himself to painting and violin playing, to the no small consternation of his father, who could not help marvelling at the strange bird growing up in the quiet, orderly, clerical nest. All this while, whatever may have been his progress, he had no teacher but Nature, and it was only during the last year of his theological curriculum that he had the ad- vantage of lessons from Alexander Nasmyth, and that only for the period of one month. At the age of twenty-one, he was licensed ; and on the death of his father, in the first year of the cen- tury, he succeeded to the Dailly manse and the 154 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. Dailly pulpit. A year after, he married ; and in a house rapidly filling with babies he composed his sermons, painted his pictures, and played on his violin. In 1 805 he was translated to the parish of Duddingstone, near Edinburgh — a place per- haps the best suited for him in Scotland — where he could .walk out into the fields at eventide, like Isaac ; where he could watch the purple thunder-gloom gathering on the distant hills, like Claude. In May, passing along the Queen's Drive in a south-easterly direction — sheep and lambs bleating above, the starling glistening as it sweeps past through the sunshine — you see Dud- dingstone Loch beneath you, with its stunted and pollard willows, whitey-green in the wind, its banks and promontories of rushes, its swans and beds of water lilies, its cloud-shadows crossed by the trail of low-flying teal. Pro- ceeding some twenty yards or so, you come in sight of the little village itself, and note its grey, low-roofed Norman-like church, its scattered houses, with garden-slopes behind filled with plum and apple blossom ; its yellow-faced inn, in which tradition mumbles Prince Charles slept the night before the battle of Prestonpans, or THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 155 else the night after ; and the swiftly-greening woods beyond, stretching towards Portobello and the sea. As you look down upon it from the Drive, 'tis a mere toy-village, breathing soft smoke pillars, breathing fruit-tree fragrance. The quietest place in the whole world, you would say ; not a creature to be seen in the little bit of a street visible ; silent as Pompeii itself; motion only on the lake, when the coot shoots across its surface, or when a swan, thrust- ing its long neck under water, tilts itself upward in its preposterous fashion. And this little clachan of twenty or thirty houses is walled, too, like a Babylon or Nineveh ; its wall not one on which six chariots could race abreast, but of strictly modest pretensions. Descending on Duddingstone, you find it retired, low-lying, sunshiny, umbrageous ; a place in which in summer you may expect plenty of dust in the narrow streets, plenty of drowsy bees around the double-flowered white and purple stocks in the gardens, plenty of flies buzzing in the sunny parlour windows. You see the old low-roofed Norman-looking church — several centuries old some portions of it, antiquaries say — with its pointed windows and flagged roof; the church- 156 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. yard heaped and mounded with generations on generations of village dead; the rusty "jougs" — an iron collar, in which malefactors did pen- ance of old — hanging on the churchyard wall near the gate of entrance, with its " louping-on- stane," well worn by the hob-nails of dead farmers. Near the church is the manse, in which the minister-painter lived, looking out with all its windows on the lake ; on ivied Craig- millar, in which Queen Mary dwelt ; on the low hills of Braid, over whichMarmion rode, and on which Fitz Eustace Raised his bridle hand, And made a deniivolte in air, at sight of the old Edinburgh of the Jameses, smoke-swathed ; and beyond, on the lovely un- dulating line of the Pentlands, stained, as in these bright spring days, with the white uproll- ing vapour of the heather-burnings. Dudding- stone is the prettiest place in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh in summer; and it is, if possible, still more worth seeing about Christmas. Then the swans are of course gone ; the chestnuts have lost their broad drooping fans, and have donned their strange snow draperies ; from out the frosty THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 157 blue, white Arthur's Seat looks down on the little village. At that season Edinburgh flocks Duddingstone-wards. Pedestrians and carriages stand along the margin of the loch; carriages and pedestrians move slowly along the Queen's Drive above. The lake itself is crowded as Vanity Fair; skaters shoot hither and thither; while in a carefully-preserved circle, members of the Edinburgh Skating Club go through the most graceful evolutions, and interweave with each other the prettiest loops and chains. At a little distance the curlers are busy, their faces red with exercise, their eyes bright with excitement, the on-lookers stamping their chilled feet in the snow, and attempting to breathe a little warmth into their frost-bitten fingers. Elsewhere, on great belts of slides, people are working" their arms like awkward windmills. Here skims a skate-shod Diana — fleet huntress of men ! — yonder, in a sleigh driven by admirers, sits a lady enveloped in furs. Past your ear whizzes a shinty ball, and down upon you in hot pursuit thereof comes, with a noise like a troop of wild horses, a horde of young fellows, each armed with a cudgel, a long-haired Highlander leading the charge — as Murat was wont to do — 158 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. several lengths in front. The Highlander is up with the ball, as he turns on it his foot slips, and in a moment the crowd are over him. There is a general melh, and then out of the crowd, and in an opposite direction, spins the ball, another fellow leading the pursuit now, the eager crowd streaming behind him like a comet's tail. So around Duddingstone the seasons come and go — so they came and went while Thomson lived there, with umbrageousness of summer, pallor of winter; each differing from the other, yet each aiding the painter's education. In the pretty Duddingstone manse Thomson established himself, and there, for thirty-five years, his life flowed on peacefully, prosperously, honoured by high and low. As a clergyman, he was much esteemed by his parishioners, con- sisting mainly of well-to-do folks who lived in villas, small market -gardeners who brought their produce into Edinburgh, and washerwomen who worked for the inhabitants of the city, wash- ing the clothes in the loch, and bleaching and drying them on the slopes of Arthur's Seat, where they caught the scent of the broom. To the former class, the minister commended himself by his accomplishments, his gentlemanly man- THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 159 ners, and his distinction ; to the latter by his liberahty and kind-heartedness, and his frank ways of going in and out amongst them. The price of many a landscape came to the poor people, when sickness or distress was prevalent, in the shape of bottles of wine or even of com- forts more substantial. It was at Duddingstone that Thomson first devoted himself to landscape painting as a profession. Craigmillar was before his eyes every time he looked out of his window, and this subject he frequently painted — often with grand effect by moonlight. While at Dailly he distributed landscapes amongst his friends; at Duddingstone he accepted payment. The first picture was sold for fifteen guineas ; and the artist, it is said, was so startled by the mighty sum, that it was only when Mr Williams, the delineator of Greek scenery, whom he con- sulted on the subject, told him that the work was worth three times as much, that he could comfort- ably consign the coins to his breeches pocket. As his reputation rose the demand for his works increased, and in his heyday of health and artis- tic prosperity, he was in the receipt of ii^iSoo per annum. Some idea of Thomson's industry may be gathered from the prices he received. For a i6o THE MINISTER-PAINTER. picture thirty inches long, and from twenty to twenty-five inches broad, he got twenty-five guineas ; for one forty-eight or fifty inches by thirty-six, his price was fifty guineas. These Avere high prices for a Scottish artist at that date ; and for the works executed for the Duke of Buccleuch, and which may be seen at Bowhill, he received still larger sums. His passion for his art grew with his years, and he searched the country for subjects for his easel with greater ardour, one almost fears, than he showed in searching the Scriptures for texts for his sermons. His pulpit at Duddingstone had to be filled of course, but then the capital was near and probationers were plenti- ful. By the time the young artist left the manse on Saturday afternoon, the probationer had arrived with a couple of sermons in his carpet-bag. In company with his friend Mr Williams — "Grecian Williams" he was called, familiarly and afTection- ately, from those pictures already alluded to on which his reputation mainly rests — he explored the country for ancient houses with trees round them, picturesque glens, castles beetling over the sea, and bare moors with a group of old Scotch lirs, their bronze trunks and black-green crowns glowing in the fires of autumn sunset. The THE MINISTER-PAINTER. i6i two friends sketched together and were each the other's critic. In these passionate sketching pil- grimages, extending over many years, Thomson visited the most picturesque districts of Scotland, and painted Dunstafifnage, Dunluce, Wolfs Crag, the Falls of Kilmorack, Glenfinlas, Lochs Awe and Etivc ; nay, he even penetrated as far as Skye and painted the magnificent peak of Ben Blaven, and the edges of Cuchullin holding dark communion with the cloud. Being a clergyman, Thomson, although urged to do so, \vould never become a member of any incorporated body of artists ; but he always sent his pictures to the Exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy. From 1808 to 1840 he contributed to those exhibitions one hundred and nine works. He not the less was strangely disinclined to exhibit in London, and, as a rule, Englishmen are not acquainted with his pictures. In the beginning of the year 1840 his health began to fail; but though no improvement took place during sum- mer, he still worked on at picture and sermon. Conscious that his end was nigh, on a lovely October afternoon he desired to be taken to a window, and propped up by pillows, that he might watch once more the setting sun. It was a last i62 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. interview between the ancient friends — an eternal farewell-taking. The sun set ruddily. Thomson was dead next morning. He was twice married — happily both times — and his portrait, by his son-in-law, Mr Robert Scott Lauder, hangs in the Scottish National Gallery. During Thomson's life, Duddingstone Manse was not more remarkable for exquisite picture painting and violin playing than for the distin- guished men occasionally gathered under its roof. When Thomson came up to Edinburgh as a stu- dent, he made the acquaintance of Scott and Jeffrey, and during life his friendship with both remained unimpaired. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, and John Clerk (Lord Eldin), who with a Homeric conviviality, broad humorous speech, and eccen- tric manners, combined a love of art, and had made an admirable collection of paintings, draw- ings, prints, and etchings, were frequent visitors at the manse. John Wilson, as great a landscape painter in words as Thomson in colours, occasion- ally dropped in on the minister to discuss the Greek and Latin poets with him, and to see what landscape was smiling or glooming on his canvas. I am indebted for the following note concerning the painter's artistic friends, to Mr W. B. John- THE MINISTER-PAINTER, 163 stone, Curator of the Scottish National Gallery, and himself an admirable artist, the extent of whose information on such matters is only- equalled by his courtesy in imparting it : — " I think Thomson preferred the company of artists to that of literary men or lawyers, and after painters he liked to have musicians about him. During his earlier career there were few artists of sufficient standing to be associated with him on equal terms. I can only call to remembrance Alexander Naismith, Raeburn, and H. W. Williams, who could be ranked pari passu. But when Thomson was at his best, Naismith had become an old cynical man ; and although it is said that Thomson had taken lessons from him, their styles were wide apart, and Thom- son's was more generally admired. Raeburn, engrossed with the study of character and ex- pression in the human face, looked on landscape as a mere accessory to art. He was intimate with Thomson, admired his genius and general accomplishments, respected his social position ; but the congeniality of feeling between the men may be doubted from the following transaction : — They agreed to change pictures ; Raeburn was to paint Thomson's portrait, and in return 1 64 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. Thomson was to paint a landscape. Thomson sat to Raeburn, and the portrait was painted ; and although Thomson repeatedly offered to fulfil his part of the agreement, Raeburn declined to give up the portrait, and, accordingly it has never been out of the possession of Raeburn and his family. " Grecian Williams " was a man after Thomson's own heart. They were about the same age, they were ardent worshippers of Nature, which they looked on exactly in the same preconceived idea or aspect, viz., the classic form, and no petty jealousy could have place between them, as the one worked in oils, the other in water colours. Williams was possessed of some literary taste, was quiet and gentlemanly in his manners, and was, like Thomson, on terms of intimacy with most of the principal Edin- burgh men. William Allan and Andrew Wilson were on friendly terms with the minister, and were with him occasionally at the manse ; but Thomson had now achieved a high position, and a number of clever young artists were springing up, and he took pleasure in having them rather than their ciders around him. Of the young artists, Robert Scott Lauder and William Simson were most frequently at the 777^ MINISTER-PAINTER. 165 manse. Lauder was there almost daily ; his admiration of Thomson was unbounded. The rich tones of colour he generally attained in his own pictures much resembled those Thomson often successfully produced, and Thomson's liking for the young artist was confirmed when he afterwards became his son-in-law. Simson's style was not what Thomson aimed at, yet the feelincf for Nature and the admirable execution impressed Thomson most favourably; and many of the figures, vessels, etc., in Thomson's pictures are evidently the work of this artist's dexterous hand. Thomas Duncan was an occasional visitor. Thomson marked him as a rising man, and Duncan had a high respect for the talent of Buddy, as he styled the minister (who was rather slovenly in his dress, the front of his waistcoat being generally besmeared with snuff), but their aims in art were widely apart ; Duncan could never get up, or cared to evince the same ad- miration for a landscape as for a figure picture. Thomson showed a great liking for Horatio Macculloch, and when he came up from Glasgow or Hamilton, where he then resided, to the open- ing of the Annual Exhibition at Edinburgh, he had him always to dine at the manse. Many 1 66 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. other young artists — Sir Francis Grant, the Presi- dent of the Royal Academy, then commencing his career, E. T. Crawford, Robert Gibb, and others — were kindly noticed by Thomson and asked to his house. He kept almost an open house ; and when distinguished artists came from London — Wilkie or Turner, for instance — his young friends were always invited to dine at the manse, in order that they might meet and be introduced to the brilliant strangers." All this shows a kindly, composed, generous disposition, far above professional vanity and rivalry, which is pleasant to contemplate. Turner was frequently at the manse, and we all know the story how when the minister took the brzisqiie painter into his studio and showed him his works, he called out, "You beat me in frames, Thom- son ! " On another occasion, at Duddingstone, when Francis Grant and Mr Horsman, M.P.> were present. Grant, who then resided in Regent's Park, near the Zoological Gardens, asked the great painter to dine with him. " I'll be very glad," cried Turner jocosely ; " I often come to see the wild beasts feed." Thomson, during his lifetime, was the greatest Scottish landscape painter, and even yet he is THE MINISTER-PAINTER. 167 one of the greatest which the northern school has produced. His style was based on classic nodels, he was a devout student of Claude and tie Poussins, but this study of the old masters of landscape was supplemented by a constant refer- erce to Nature. He worked constantly in the op;n air, and face to face with his subject. Wiile a young man, and living in his father's maise at Dailly, he would frequently go out at twc o'clock an a summer morning, and walk sevTal miles, to watch the effect of the early suroeams penetrating the tree branches, retiring ste] by step to note the changes of the light. Maiy of the old fastnesses on the Scottish coat he sketched on the spot. Although de- fecive in drawing, he was fond of colour, and by repinting on his pictures succeeded in producing a sirface which increased the richness and lustre of his tints. But his gains in this way were not enirely clear. In the hurry and excitement of hi task, he often worked over his surface before tk under colours were dry ; and as in laying 01 his colours he used various kinds of medium, o vehicle, to attain brilliancy and depth of ttne, many of his pictures have suffered by con- t action and cracking, and are now but the dim i68 THE MINISTER-PAINTER. ghosts of themselves — the battle flag, shot-torn, and smoke-stained, as compared with the origi-< nal silken sheet. An incomplete draughtsman Thomson had yet fine general ideas of form ani the effect of grand lines. His works are alwars O m bold, picturesque, vigorous, and they never fiil to impress the imagination. He is always great in masses, and having by that means toucted the soul of the spectator, he allows the spectaior to supply the details. He pours himself, s( to speak, on the key of the position in glocmy brigades of strength, and, having won tha^ is satisfied — he does not waste himself in skirmsh- ing, however brilliant. There is no play in his pictures. The truth is, he was always a litle divided in his allegiance between Nature aid the Poussins. He was all for Nature in lis sketch in the open air, he was all for Pousin while working in his studio. His pictures, wth their incontestable fine qualities, are just a litle too like pictures. Nature in them smells of dl, somehow. Bold and noble as was his imagini- tion, able to cope with scenes of gloom and pilel- up rocky wildness, he lacked a tender sense